Qiildren form a significant proportion of accident services' clientele but have received relatively little attention in the growing ethnographic literature on such organizations. This paper uses data from observation and interviews in four English acddent departments to review Jeffery's influential analysis of medical staffs categorization of patients. After pointing to certain logical difficulties with this account, it is argued that an analysis of the way children are treated allows for these to be remedied by the development of a more sophisticated model of professional decision-making. The paper concludes with a discussion of the way in which the categorization rests on the practical contingencies of accident work and the social organization of emergency work. Attention is drawn to the variation between high-prestige units in teaching hosppitals and lower-status units in general hospitals and the way this limits the ability of the former to identify conditions like child abuse or neglect.
IntroductionThe invisibility of children in social scientific work has been a matter for increasing comment (e.g. Mackay, 1973;Skolnick, 1974;Fine and Glassner, 1979;May and Strong, 1980;Prout, 1980). Although there is a great deal of research which purports to be about children, much of this, on examination, merely seems to offer a quasi-scientific warrant for current adult common sense. Such responses as these critiques have provoked, goes mostly in one or other of two directions: first, some investigators (e.g. Speier, 1969Speier, , 1971Qcourel et al. 1974;Fine and Glassner, 1979) have tried to produce descriptions of children's own culture, social competences and practical reasoning; second, other researchers (e.g. Davis and Strong, 1976;Silverman, 1981) have looked at the ways in which adults formulate and assign specific social identities to diildren. While these approaches are undoubtedly extending a sociological understanding of childhood, however, they remain open to Our intention in this paper is to show how 'taking children seriously' requires us to revise some influential recent analyses of the processes by which patients are classified in accident and emergency departments and allows us to bring out the oi^anizational and occupational logic of the scheme which members appear to use.