Play and childhoods: how are the relationships between researching play and children changing?

This chapter reviews how recent scholarship examining the nature of childhood can enable insight into different aspects of play. Our approach develops from the new sociology of childhood’s conceptualisation of childhood as constructed and its advocacy of children being experts in their own lives. The chapter analyses how play features in three different research projects. In the first project, a ‘day in the life’ approach is used to generate and share data with children who are ‘temporarily displaced’ in Lebanon as a result of armed conflict in their birth countries. The second project involves a researcher working alongside two young children, developing a ‘child-conferencing’ approach over time to enable each child to work as a co-researcher of their experiences and perceptions of play. The third project involves adult researchers training and mentoring young children as researchers, drawing on play as a data collection method in their research design