Researching child poverty: Towards a lifeworld orientation

Abstract

Childhood research with children in poverty involves a diversity of dilemmas and complexities. In the context of a recent research project in Belgium, the authors attempt to embrace child poverty as a normative issue created a crisis of representation. In order to untangle this, they situate different methodological approaches in relation to the constructed epistemological windows on child poverty. The authors differentiate between research in which the authentic voice of children in poverty is represented, and research in which their lifeworld is interpreted through a lifeworld orientation perspective that pursues human dignity and social justice in our societies.

‘I am not poor. Poor children live in Africa’: Social identity and children's perspectives on growing up in contexts of poverty and deprivation in the Netherlands

“…The public areas that are available to children are perceived to be unsafe and in poor condition and, as the children say, stay the same, day in day out, which makes them boring. It is striking how our findings are consistent with other Western qualitative studies on child poverty (for example: Attree, ; Ridge, ; Roets and others, ; Sutton, ; Van Gils and Willekens, ) and thus once again point to the need to take action to improve children's living and playing conditions.…”

“…Sime's suggestion to avoid the use of words like ‘poverty’ and ‘poor’ and not to ask children explicitly about the meaning of ‘being poor’, still presents researchers with a ‘crisis of representation’, particularly if they claim to access the authentic voice of ‘the poor child’ to represent the essence of living in a context of poverty. Roets and others () agree with Sime that researchers should take a lifeworld orientation when addressing children in contexts of poverty and stress that this should mean that researchers focus on the complex and dynamic relationship between the individual and society, and attempt to capture the child's voice in its interactional context. They argue that reflexivity is crucial when attempting to provide a representation of children's voices.…”

“…They argue that reflexivity is crucial when attempting to provide a representation of children's voices. Contradictions in the ways in which children's perspectives can be interpreted should be embraced as an unresolved puzzle in human interaction rather than minimised (Roets and others, ). We tried to be sensitive to this puzzle in our project, and in this paper, we provide detailed descriptions of the perspectives of two groups of participating Dutch children.…”

From Silence to Solidarity: Locating the Absent ‘Child Voice’ in the Struggle Against Benefit Sanctions

“…For the purposes of this article, we will focus on three salient critiques of approaches which attempt to ‘captur[e] and represent the authentic voice of children in poverty’ (Roets and others, , 538). The first of these critiques is that this neglects the contexts producing such voices, and instead presents children's voices as ‘facts’, where their articulations can be viewed as representing the essence of being poor.…”

Support for Children’s Protagonism

“…When the experts' priorities were not clearly indicated, we had to make judgements about the behaviour, emotions and silences being expressed and to acknowledge that our interpretation of affect might be misguided (Green & Reid, 1996;Lewis 2010). Of course, all of these dilemmas link to longstanding concerns about the need for reflexivity in all data interpretation (Bourdieu 1992), including interpretation of children's perspectives (Lewis 2010) and their experience of poverty (Roets et al 2013).…”