The Meanings of Research: Kids as Subjects and Kids as Inquirers

This article helps problematize the category of childhood as well as our habits of making summary statements about children as research participants. Drawing on data from a 2-year ethnographic study of an urban elementary school that combined conventional interview and observation research on kids with efforts to enlist kids as researchers, the article suggests that even relatively young people have experiences with "research" in the course of their everyday and institutional activities that shape how they interpret and participate in our research endeavors (a point ignored generally, not just in the case of kids). The article makes a case for articulating participant inquiry with researcher- driven inquiry as a way of opening up new questions and new understandings of participants' worlds and their links to researchers' worlds.