- She’s our prisoner! – theoretical, epistemological, ethical and methodological issues about young children’s assent to ethnographic research

Abstract

Subscribing the Sociology of Childhood approach that considers children as social actors and advocates ethnography as an useful methodology to let children´s voices to be heard in sociological data production (James & Prout 1990), this text reflects about some epistemological, theoretical, methodological and ethical issues inherent to field work with children aged from 3-6, taken during a school year in a kindergarten located in urban area. Focusing on the theoretical and ethical principle of informed consent and its practice with young children, the text discusses tensions and boundaries between this principle and the one of assent in the course of participant observation. The analysis of children’s assents and refusals and the configurations that may take over the research, seeks to show the assent processes as contingent, heterogeneous and dependent on the social relations built on research context as well as interpretations that children weave about the person of the researcher.