Reports of Empirical Studies

Reports of Empirical Studies

Sociological Development

There are significant ways in which the positions taken by sociologists and developmental psychologists on the issue of child development diverge. Sociologists problematize the very idea of the child rather than treat it as a practical and prestated being with a relatively determined trajectory and certainly do not seek to offer advice concerning its appropriate mode of maturation. As I shall attempt here, sociology endeavors to realize the child as constituted socially, as a status of person which is comprised through a series of, often heterogeneous, images, representations, codes, and constructs. This is an increasingly popular perspective within contemporary childhood studies (James & Prout, 1990; Jenks, 1982/1992, 1989; Qvortrup, 1993; Stainton-Rogers, 1991).

Sociology is burgeoning in its innovative work in relation to children and in finding its way toward a concerted sociology of childhood and it still has a degree of exciting work to do. A major contribution consolidating such research was provided by James and Prout (1990) in a work that attempted to establish a new paradigm in our thinking. It is worthy of consideration here and I shall quote it in full, it can act as a manifesto in our subsequent considerations of the significance and relevance of sociological theory in our approach to development:

the key features of the paradigm:

* 1. Childhood is understood as a social construction. As such it provides an interpretive frame for contextualising the early years of human life. Childhood, as distinct from biological immaturity, is neither a natural nor a universal feature of human groups but appears as a specific structural and cultural component of many societies.

* 2. Childhood is a variable of social analysis. It can never be entirely divorced from other variables such as class, gender and ethnicity. Comparative and cross-cultural analysis reveals a variety of childhoods rather than a single or universal phenomenon.

* 3. Children's social relationships and cultures are worthy of study in their own right, independent of the perspective and concern of adults.

* 4. Children are and must be seen as active in the construction and determination of their own social lives, the lives of those around them and of the societies in which they live. Children are not just passive subjects of social structures and processes.

* 5. Ethnography is a particularly useful methodology for the study of childhood. It allows children a more direct voice and participation in the production of sociological data than is possible through experimental or survey styles of research.

* 6. Childhood is a phenomenon in relation to which the double hermeneutic of the social sciences is acutely present. That is to say, to proclaim a new paradigm of childhood sociology is also to engage in and respond to the process of reconstructing childhood. (James & Prout, 1990: pp. 8-9).

Such an approach, in this context, displays a variety of purposes. First, an attempt to displace the overwhelming claim made on childhood by the realm of commonsense reasoning - not that such reasoning is inferior or unsystematic but that it ...