Practice-Based Research in Children's Play

Russell, Wendy, Lester, Stuart

• Éditeur: Policy Press
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781447330066
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: Children's Studies in Sociology

This unique collection of 12 research projects carried out by experienced practitioners in the play sector in the UK and USA puts forward a range of perspectives on children's play and adults' relationships with it. Drawing on a diverse range of research methodologies, the studies consider adults' memories of play; the co-production of spaces where children can play (in adventure playgrounds, out of school clubs, children's zoos, children's museums and public space); therapeutic approaches to playwork; playwork and wellbeing; supporting the play of severely disabled children and young people; play and contemporary art practice; and children's use of technology in a playground. Offering a fresh look beyond the dominant singular voice of developmental psychology, this book is essential reading for anyone studying or working with children at play.

Part One

Then and now: historical perspectives

TWO

Nostalgia and play

Paula Harris

Introduction

This chapter describes a small-scale study that explored older generations’ memories and feelings of nostalgia about their own childhood play experiences and compared these with their ideas about children’s play today. Alongside this, children’s own accounts of playing in the same town in the Welsh Valleys were collected and set against adult memories and beliefs about contemporary conditions for playing. A technique regularly employed by playwork professionals in training and advocating for the child’s right to play is to ask adults to remember how they played as children and the joy they gained from this experience, invoking emotionally charged memories. Playworkers are also encouraged to use their own memories as a means of reflecting on their practice to improve the quality of provision, alongside intuition, evidence from the literature and experience of working with children (Hughes, 2001). This chapter argues that a deeper appreciation of how memory is intricately entwined with affect, emotion and place allows for a more nuanced approach to using memory as an effective advocacy tool. In the study described here, this was explored through semi-structured interviews with children and adults who had grown up in the same town, alongside the use of nostalgia measures of the adults’ accounts. As Labaree (2016) notes, self-reporting can have limitations as a research method given the potential for selective memory, telescoping (right memory wrong timescale), attribution (attributing negative outcomes to external forces or to other people) and exaggeration. However, this study was less concerned with the accuracy of memory and more with what memory does in terms of giving meaning to children’s play experiences today. This required an engagement with the affective registers of memory, and this was explored through the literature on and research approaches to nostalgia.

Memory makes us what we are, and along with emotion/affect it forms the interrelating processes of our ongoing lives…We are conglomerations of past everyday experiences, including their spatial textures and affective registers. Memory should not be seen (simply) as a burden of the past, rather it is fundamental to ‘becoming’, and a key wellspring of agency, practice/habit, creativity and imagination. (Jones and Garde-Hanson, 2012, p 8)

Memory studies cover a wide field of disciplines. As Jones and Garde-Hansen (2012) note, memory is intimately connected to place, identity and emotion/affect. Rather than being an accurate and static image of the past, memories are continually reworked in the present, connecting to current experiences, contexts and ways of being (Jones, 2011).

Nostalgia is broadly understood as a complex emotion (Sedikides et al, 2004) and can be defined as ‘a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations’ (New Oxford English Dictionary). Johnson-Laird and Oatley (1989) indicate the complexity and dualistic nature of nostalgia, saying it is predominantly a ‘happiness’ emotion, but with a bittersweet undercurrent of a past lost, never to be regained. The discontinuity hypotheses of nostalgia suggests that ‘nostalgia is an emotional reaction to discontinuity in people’s lives…people who experience disruption in their lives will rate the past more favorably than those who experience continuity’ (Sedikides et al, 2004, p 208). Moran (2002) argues that many nostalgic narratives idealise the childhood of our collective pasts rather than focusing on individual lived experience, describing the concept of childhood as, ‘desired by adults for its innocence and the sentimentalized utopia of the middle class nursery’ (Moran, 2002, p 157). Similarly, Karsten (2005, p 276) notes that ‘[t]here is an overall tendency…to assume that things were better in the past’. Nostalgic memories of childhood portray it as a space in time free from adult control, but feeling loved and protected by family and friends, in contrast to the restrictions placed on contemporary childhood from political, educational and legal institutions. Such a contrast may serve to feed adults’ anxieties about the threats to children from outside influences (Moran, 2002; Wildschut et al, 2006). This is echoed in a survey commissioned by Play England for Playday 2007 (ICM Research, 2007), which found that when participants were asked to compare the present day to their past experiences, the past provided a picture of idyllic landscapes, safety and imagination, whereas play for the child of the present was characterised by lack of imagination, sterile environments, computers, fear and violence.

One effect of this fear and perception of violence is that parents are increasingly unwilling to let children explore the outside world unsupervised (Shaw et al, 2012; Shaw et al, 2015). The spread of mass media means that instances of violence against children by strangers are reported in great detail; parents believe such events to be more common than they are and feel anxious about their children’s safety in this respect (Layard and Dunn, 2009). The Play England survey (ICM Research, 2007) shows how children’s place in the general environment is coloured by personal perspective: parents identified threats to children playing out, whereas non-parents saw children and young people as a nuisance. These competing ideas of children, what Hendrick (1997) has described as the victim/threat dualism, may have contributed to adults’ fears about children playing out. The idea of the child in need of protection versus the child in need of correction is a social paradigm still evident in reports linking social exclusion to criminality (Layard and Dunn, 2009).

Although nostalgia has been viewed predominantly as a positive emotion that builds a sense of self and social belonging, it has also been argued that nostalgic experience can result in a desire and yearning for a utopian past that may or may not have occurred in the life of the individual. As such, nostalgia in terms of childhood and early adolescence experience may function differently depending on the life circumstances and experiences of the individual receiving information about present childhood, how that information is given or received and on their own interactions and/or observations of children in public spaces. Nostalgia may reaffirm the adult’s belief that the child of the present does not have the same opportunities as they had and so is a victim of social, cultural and political change or alternatively that children themselves are somehow responsible for any perceived change for the worse and are therefore a threat to the possibly idealistic view which the adult holds of their own childhood.

Depending on whether and how nostalgia plays a role in generating positive opinions of children’s play behaviour and use of space, the practice of drawing on memory as a tool for play advocates and playworkers may either continue to be a useful tool or a case of misplaced nostalgia (Neisser, 1991). It may be pertinent therefore to query whether nostalgia triggered by anxiety in relation to perceived present-day threat to/from children may actually serve to expand the generational gap in regards to how adults view the play behaviour of children and their use of public space. In addition, nostalgia might affect adults’ ability to think positively about present and future childhoods. However, by enhancing the adults’ self-esteem, sense of social stability and providing a reference and meaning to their lives, nostalgia may function to draw attention to shared experiences and emphasise comparisons and continuity between generations, thus providing a platform from which to advocate for the child’s right to play.

Approaching the research

The study took an inductive approach, working from the ‘bottom up’ to find patterns in the data collected from which new understanding may develop (Creswell, 2007). It took an epistemological position of social constructionism, which sees the ‘reality’ (of children’s play) as mediated ‘historically, culturally and linguistically’ and as such is perceived differently by different individuals, allowing for more than one way of knowing (Willig, 2001, p 7). Furthermore, as reality is constructed, then the meaning given to the phenomena (children’s play and adults play nostalgia) will be different for different individuals (Crotty, 1998). The research therefore explored the meaning given to children’s play and use of space, from the perspective of the adult reporting nostalgic recollections of playing out as a child and from the perspective of children currently living the experience. The intention of the study was to recruit and interview adults between the ages of 18 and 65 who came from families where two or more generations had grown up in the same locality and also with children aged eight to 14 from the same town. This meant that there could be some parallels in terms of shared spaces and opportunities for playing, as well as recognition of the importance of children’s relationship with space and the spatial aspects of memory (Jones, 2011). Nine adults were recruited through personal contacts of the researcher, though no participants were close personal friends or family. With the exception of one participant, adults interviewed were not currently involved in children’s play projects and had no prior knowledge of current playwork thinking.

All the children who participated in the research lived in the town and the surrounding settlements. They either attended open access¹ outdoor play sessions at one of the local parks or used the park to ‘hang out’ with friends on a regular basis, so were known to the playworkers at the site. Ten children agreed to participate in the study and signed consent was obtained from them and their parents. Child participants were in the age range eight to 14 years old (the predominant age range of children using both the park and the open access play project) with largest numbers of children being in the eight- to nine-year-old and the 12- to 14-year-old age ranges.

The research comprised semi-structured interviews and nostalgia measures. Semi-structured or focused interviews are probably the most commonly used interview method for obtaining qualitative research data (Dawson, 2007). Using open questions enabled the interviewer to gain an individual perspective from the participant who is allowed the time and scope to express their opinions and feelings on the subject decided by the interviewer. Open-ended questions regarding children’s current play experiences were prepared in advance and split into two sections. The first set of questions focused on what children liked playing, where and with whom, to what extent adults organised play opportunities, and attendance at organised activities. The second set of questions looked at the community in which the child lives, where they can and cannot play and relationships with neighbours. Similar questions were used for the adult participants, with the addition of questions to elicit adults’ feelings and thoughts about contemporary children’s play, changes between the past and present, concerns about children playing out today, and how their concerns and opinions were formed.

Adult participants were interviewed within their own homes in accordance with the policies and procedures for lone working of the organisation in which the researcher was employed and after providing signed consent. These interviews were recorded on a dictaphone in order that the researcher had a complete record.

Children were interviewed at a local play setting. However, due to the noise level and disturbance, it became apparent early on that the use of a dictaphone would prove difficult. Instead, handwritten notes were taken by the researcher and read back to the children after the interview. In this way they could add detail to what they had reported or amend any errors made.

During the research, three paired interviews were conducted, one with young people, one with a married couple and one with an adult father and son. In all of these cases participants stated a preference for being interviewed together. This approach can be useful where participants feel a little shy about being interviewed alone or are concerned that they may not be able to answer a question. Bo...

Table des matières

• Coverpage
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• one: Perspectives on play research: the practice-theory-research entanglement
• Part One: Then and now: historical perspectives
• part Two: Here and there, this and that: spatial and creative perspectives
• Part Three: Playfulness and wellbeing
• Closing thoughts
• Appendix: The Playwork Principles