Introducing Research in Early Childhood

Polly Bolshaw, Jo Josephidou

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526451743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation de la petite enfance

"What a useful book for the beginner researcher! Offering a grounding in the different kinds of research conducted in the field of early childhood, this book's inviting and accessible style will support the novice researcher, and the development of criticality in relation to research."

Deborah Albon, Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Studies, University of Roehampton

What does the term 'research' in early childhood actually mean? What does research involve, and how do you go about doing it?

This book explains exactly what 'research' is; it explores key ideas, themes and terminology to provide you with a clear understanding of its importance toyour early years or early childhood studiesdegree.

It will help you:

· Understand what it means to think critically, and unpick childhood research

· Learn how to analyse, examine and understand the importance of others' research

· Get to know how research is designed and carried out

· Appreciate the importance of ethics

· Get to grips with translating research into real life in an early childhood setting.

Laying the foundations to develop your confidence in talking about research and making links between theory and practice, this book will support you as you begin your research journey into the world of early years.

Polly Bolshaw is a Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University.

Jo Josephidou is a Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University. Polly Bolshaw and Jo Josephidou will be discussing ideas from Introducing Research in Early Childhood in Doing Your Early Years Research Project, a SAGE Masterclass for early years students and practitioners in collaboration with Kathy Brodie.Find out morehere.

1 Introduction to Research in Early Childhood

Introduction

Welcome to the world of early childhood research! Whatever your starting point in terms of understanding research, this book will provide you with a firm foundation that you can build on as you continue in your studies.

This chapter will …

• Build your understanding of what is meant by the term ‘research’.
• Explore some of the purposes of research in relation to early childhood.
• Consider what research means to those studying early childhood, and why it is important for children, families and communities that research is carried out.
• Reflect upon the role that research plays in informing policy and the ways in which it may support you in identifying and developing quality practice within early childhood.
• Highlight the breadth of ways in which research is conducted in early childhood, which we will build upon in later chapters.

What is this book about?

This book aims to introduce you to the concept of research in relation to early childhood. It focuses specifically on children aged from birth to eight years old and will encourage you to debate, discuss and analyse the process of research and how other people choose to conduct it.

The book starts by considering research in relation to early childhood quite broadly. We will discuss how it is important to make sure that you do not take sources of information and pieces of research on face value, but instead think critically about them. It then explores the ideas of knowledge and truth in research, and how our beliefs about these concepts shape how we know and what we know about children and their childhoods. Next, you will consider ‘the language of research’ and think about why it is important to build an understanding of specific research terminology. This terminology might be the same words that you come across in your everyday life but with a different meaning in an academic sense.

After that, we will compare and contrast research ‘about’ children and research ‘with’ children, by exploring what is meant by each of these ideas, and how they link to research designs like longitudinal studies and cross-national research. Following that, we begin to think about some of the specific aspects that researchers must bear in mind before carrying out a study, such as how to act ethically and how to choose the design of a piece of research, whether that is through using numbers, words or a more creative approach. Finally, we will ask you as the reader to begin to think about becoming a researcher yourself, and invite you to reflect upon how your knowledge about research in relation to early childhood has developed through reading and reflecting on this book.

What do we mean by research?

The first question that we need to ask ourselves when considering research in early childhood is what we actually mean by the term ‘research’. Think about the times you carry out ‘research’ in your everyday life: for instance, you may consider that using a search engine like Google to find out which bus you need to take to get into town is ‘research’, or what time films are showing at your local cinema. In your university studies, you may say that you are using a library search engine to ‘research’ a particular topic on which you need to write an assignment. We use the term ‘research’ to mean that which we want to find out about, explore or discover – something that we did not know before. We will build upon other research terms in Chapter 4 (The language of research), when we will consider how other familiar words may change their meaning within a research context.

We can also think about the idea of ‘research’ in an academic sense, which is what this book will focus on. We consider research in ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) to be related to investigations, studies and experiments that contribute to new information about young children, their lives, their families and their communities. In this sense, research is about creating new knowledge, rather than learning knowledge that has already been acquired or provided by someone else. For example, let’s say a researcher wants to conduct research on what parents think about using health visitor services. They carry out a study by interviewing new parents and analysing the conversations they have with those parents. This helps them to come up with new knowledge, which researchers call ‘findings’, about common parental opinions of health visitors. This information might support and agree with what other researchers have found. Alternatively, it might contradict existing research-informed practice, and lead to changes in what health visitors do.

In this book, we define research in early childhood as being about asking questions that we have about children and their lives, and attempting to answer those questions by discovering new knowledge, opinions, perspectives and understanding. This fits with other definitions, including that by a charity called the National Children’s Bureau (2015) who say that research is ‘not just about exploring a subject, it is about creating new knowledge and understanding’. Others liken research to discovery, for instance Fraser (2004: 16) says conducting research is like discovery ‘either because “no one has been there before” or because someone predicts what it is like there even though no one has been there’. Other authors note the importance of the role of enquiry within research, such as Lobe et al. (2007: 6), who explain ‘research is designed to answer questions’. Although these definitions are all slightly different, you can see commonalities between them. Research is about generating knowledge and answers to questions – sometimes questions that have been asked before and sometimes questions that haven’t. With regard to young children, this might relate to questions about what children’s experiences are, why they have those experiences and what the impact of those experiences might be.

When we think about who conducts research, we might think about an individual who carries out studies on a very small scale or we might think of large organisations who seek to carry out bigger pieces of research with a greater number of participants spanning a large number of countries. For instance, undergraduate university students will typically conduct a small-scale piece of research called a dissertation in their final year of studies. They could be interested in exploring what children’s views are on wearing a school uniform and give out questionnaires to one school class to help them gather opinions on this. Conversely, one organisation that collects data on a larger scale and which spans different countries is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD is an organisation of 35 member countries, including the UK, which monitors events and data in these countries in order to discuss what the implications might be of the findings of the data for those countries. The OECD can then use their data and research to advise governments across the world about what they should do or what policies they should introduce. The OECD’s aim is to ‘help governments foster prosperity and fight poverty through economic growth and financial stability’ (OECD, 2017a).

Therefore, a piece of research can be something that is quite large, or something that is rather small. However, whatever the size of the research, we can relate it to the OECD’s definition, which is that research in ECEC refers to ‘studies and analyses on any issues related to the early education and development environment of children in ECEC centres’ (OECD, 2012a: 1). It is important to remember that, whatever the size and scale of the research and whoever the researcher is, it is possible for the same research topic to be considered. Take as an example the research topic of the enjoyment that boys and girls derive from reading. Ashcroft (2017) is a student teacher who has written up a piece of research that he conducted as part of his university studies in The SteP (Student Teacher Perspectives) Journal about his study that explored how boys and girls differed in their attitudes to reading. It was carried out with quite a small sample of participants; his data comprised of 25 questionnaires completed by Year Three children from two classes in the same primary school. He found that boys were less enthusiastic about reading, and spent less time doing it. In contrast to this small study, in 2009 over half a million 15-year-olds from 65 countries took part in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), including over 4,000 children from England (Bradshaw et al., 2009; OECD, 2009). The PISA study is administered every three years and compares educational systems across the world by assessing 15-year-old children through an internationally-approved test. The 2009 PISA study found that the number of girls reading for enjoyment was much higher than the number of boys (OECD, 2011), matching Ashcroft’s (2017) findings. This shows how the same research topic can be considered both on a large and on a small scale, and either in one context or worldwide. We will consider the PISA study more in Chapter 8 (Cross-national research approaches).

Time to Consider

Consider any information you already know about early childhood and how you know that information. What would you like to know about children? If you had to carry out some research, what questions would you ask to find out new knowledge about children and their lives?

In what different ways is research carried out?

Later in Chapter 5 (Approaches to research about children) and Chapter 6 (Approaches to research with children), we will consider in much more detail how types of research can be categorised and the similarities and differences between different approaches. However, for now we will begin to consider in brief the various ways in which research can be carried out; this will be built upon in the subsequent chapters of this book. For instance, in Chapter 10 (How research is designed), you will become more familiar with the idea that research is typically either quantitative or qualitative.

In brief, quantitative research is typified by collecting measurable data that can be interpreted in a numerical way (that is, information that can be quantified) to come up with a ‘right answer’ to a research question. Conversely, qualitative research focuses on collecting data relating to attitudes, views and opinions on a particular topic, which means that rather than propose a ‘right answer’ to a question, it is instead likely to give one possible answer that would answer the question. The approach that a researcher chooses depends on the type of answer they want to their question. Sometimes, they will want to answer their question using quantitative ways of collecting information, whilst at other times researchers may use qualitative methods to come to conclusions about the world. There is not a right or wrong way to answer a research question – people have different perspectives about the best way to get new knowledge, which is something else that we will consider in this book in Chapter 3 (Knowledge and truth in research).

As well as distinguishing between quantitative and qualitative research, we can also think about different types of research design. The OECD (2012a) say that there are five main ways that research is carried out in relation to ECEC. These are:

• Policy research
• Large-scale programme evaluations
• Longitudinal studies
• Comparative, cross-national research
• Neuroscience and brain research

These five types are good to consider as a starting point to think about the different ways in which organisations and individuals collect information relating to early childhood. They are also useful to consider how different types of research may have an impact on young children and their families. The first four, in particular, we will reflect upon briefly now and will consider in more detail later in this book. The fifth main way of doing research, neuroscience and brain research, is not the focus of this book, but you can find out more in the OECD’s (2012a) Research Brief: Research in ECEC Matters report, which is suggested as further reading at the end of this chapter.

Policy research

Baldock et al. (2005: 3) suggest that policies are ‘an attempt by those working inside an organisation to think in a coherent way about what it is trying to achieve (either in general or in relation to a specific issue) and what it needs to do to achieve it’. In relation to early childhood, early years policies focus on government practices or courses of action that impact on young children’s lives. One example of policy research in England is the research that was carried out to investigate the i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Table List
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction to Research in Early Childhood
• 2 Beginning to think critically about research
• 3 Knowledge and truth in research
• 4 The language of research
• 5 Approaches to research about children
• 6 Approaches to research with children
• 7 Longitudinal research approaches
• 8 Cross-national research approaches
• 9 The ethics of research
• 10 How research is designed
• 11 Creative approaches to research
• 12 Your research journey has begun
• References
• Index