Researching the lives of children and young people
Learn about our five research themes and how we translate our findings into policy and practice in the real world.
Our key research areas
Our research is categorised into five themes:
- children’s participation
- digital childhoods
- emotional lives
- good childhoods and (extra)ordinary children
- methological innovation.
These intersecting themes inspire our work, informing our childhood and youth studies across space and time and enhancing the wellbeing and participation of children and young people in family, social and public lives.
- Children’s participation
Many of our projects foreground the perspectives of children and young people. This is particularly the case when their participation cannot be taken for granted.
This includes working with welfare and safeguarding agencies to ensure children are able to influence decisions about their lives and to help shape both targeted and universal services, such as education, more broadly.
Children are never confined just to the family or school; they are never outside of politics and history. Their experience of public life may be distinctive, in comparison to adults’ experiences, not least in the ways that adults are automatically given more agency to shape and control their environment.
But public life is no less relevant – no less intense or formative – for children and young people than for adults.
Now, especially, in our digital age, children have access to a multitude of mediated public spheres, whether they are participating from a formal forum or an online social network.
With these considerations in mind, our theme of participation acts also to emphasise work that foregrounds and theorises children’s interaction with public life, reminding us to stay attuned to the many questions that emerge from the formulation of childhood as always ‘public’ and publicly constructed.
Current projects within this theme include: Imagining Resistance through Participatory Photography.
Recent work in this theme includes the exploration by Dr Rebecca Webb and Dr Perpetua Kirby of the use of art-based education in an English primary school.
Part of the PASTRES programme, the project sought to support children to express their relationships with sustainability uncertainty. It also considered whether the lessons from their research in the Global South, 'Hope in the Present' might be adapted into the National Curriculum for schools in England.
- Digital childhoods
This theme explores the implications of the digital revolution for childhood and youth.
It examines many dimensions of digital childhoods, including the impacts of technology on parenting and play, as well as the role of the digital in personal and professional boundaries in work with children and young people.
Through our collaboration with the Sussex Humanities Lab, we seek to promote young people as entrepreneurs of digital landscapes, contributing to debates on data sharing, ownership and access as well as curators of archives and memories.
Our research also engages with how children and young people may be understood as having economic value within a digital economy, and how participation may be associated with exploitation.
We also examine the consequences of quantification as their educational performance and consumption practices are mapped, measured and monitored.
Our projects under this theme include the Nuffield Foundation-funded ‘Children's Information Project: Improving Lives Through Better Listening and Better Data’, which is co-led at Sussex by Professor Lisa Holmes and Dr Liam Berriman.
The study involves a collaboration with four local authorities in England to look at how child and family services could significantly improve outcomes for children, young people and families by transforming how information is gathered, interpreted and used, according to a new national framework.
The research sits at the intersection of the University’s core themes of Human Flourishing and Digital and Data Futures, asking how emerging digital information systems in local authorities can best respond to the needs of children, young people, families and communities.
- Emotional lives
This theme addresses historical and cultural contingencies. It considers the ways in which emotion expresses and confirms the materiality, relationality and sensuality of social lives.
It supports the development of critical thinking about established, taken-for-granted issues in childhood and youth through the lens of emotion.
We are interested in the positive emotions of kindness and pleasure, as well as anxiety and anger. We examine the ways in which affective dynamics structure collective and institutional lives and characterise intergenerational transmissions.
Our interest includes practice and policy approaches that are emotionally engaged and which build insight into emotional dynamics and development among young people and those working with and for them.
We also pioneer psychosocial methods that work with and through emotion and sensuality as a route to understanding.
We engage with these issues through projects such as ‘The Rez: An interactive podcast and comic to support adolescent wellbeing’ led by Professor Martin Spinelli and Professor Robin Banerjee.
We have also worked closely with colleagues in Psychology around the building of empathy and other skills with children. For instance, Professor Banerjee, Professor Jane Oakhill and Professor Alan Garnham have worked together on an ESRC-funded study entitled: ‘Reading feelings: does reading fiction improve children’s empathy and pro-social skills?’
- Good childhoods and (extra)ordinary children
This theme is at the heart of our interdisciplinary approach.
We explore the historical and cross-cultural approaches to understanding the diverse meanings of childhood. We also examine the ways in which global processes shape the ideas of what a ‘good childhood’ or ‘ordinary childhood’ should or could be.
Research in this theme also considers children whose circumstances are ‘extraordinary’, placing them outside of normative ideals; for instance, young migrants, child labourers and care leavers.
We consider how these categorisations can neglect the ‘ordinary’ aspects of ‘extraordinary’ children’s lives, practices and relationships.
This research pays close attention to the everyday lives of children, young people and families, including how they understand themselves. We use these insights to challenge the perceived wisdoms of policy discourses, which may focus on vulnerability, stigma and risk.
A number of our projects highlight different ways of understanding children and young people’s lives, including: ‘Not only dressed but dressing: clothing, childhood, creativity’ and ‘The Innovate Project’.
- Methodological innovation
We have established an international reputation for methodological excellence and innovation.
We have recognised strengths in participatory research with children and young people in research ethics and creative, digital, sensual and psychosocial approaches.
We interrogate the meanings of methodological innovation across disciplines.
Our work adopts imaginative methodologies which keep the child or young person at the centre of our thinking.
We have pioneered creative approaches to:
- research ethics with children in a digital age
- participatory methods of studying ethics in research with children and young people
- data sharing and reuse.
These approaches underpin our Masters module ‘Researching Childhood and Youth’.
We continually engage in international advisory work and collaborations, including hosting a series of ESRC National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) awards for methodological innovation and training.
The ‘Everyday Childhoods’ repository and the ‘Reanimating Data’ project highlight different ways in which children and young people engage in the world and how their voices may be heard.
Knowledge exchange
We are committed to translating our research findings into policy and practice in the real world.
This involves an exchange of knowledge and experience between our researchers and the communities they research. We are focused on making a difference to children and young people’s lives.
This approach applies across diverse disciplines through our efforts to build real-world understandings of lives in certain times and places.
We aim to think beyond the university, making our research visible and accessible, engaging with researched people and groups throughout the research process and beyond the lifespan of specific projects.