This paper reports on a design oriented study conducted in close collaboration between two researchers and three preschool teachers. Within this study, a play-based interview script was designed in accordance with theoretically driven principles. Based on this script, the preschool teachers conducted interviews with children from three preschools…

Background: Teachers' perspectives provide crucial insights into classroom practice in early childhood education settings. Although many kindergarten programmes emphasise play "and" assessment to support children's learning and development, recent research suggests that there are some disparities between teachers' articulated role of…

Whilst the importance of engaging with children's voices is now more widely recognized, there is still a dearth of representation of younger children's voices specifically. Visual methodological tools, such as photo-elicitation and photo-voice are used in research; however, there remains a lack of clarity about what they mean, how they are used,…

This paper uses examples from research conducted in preschools in Japan, China, and the United States to illustrate the features and virtues of return interviews with informants with whom ethnographers have long research engagements. Return interviews and long research engagements are powerful research strategies that help the ethnographers ask…

School-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) remains difficult to measure because of high sensitivity and response bias. However, most SRGBV measurement relies on face-to-face (FTF) survey administration, which is susceptible to increased social desirability bias. Widely used in research on sensitive topics, Audio Computer-Assisted Self-Interview…

Narrative inquiry as a methodological approach enables us to examine how people represent their experiences and selves through storytelling (Chase, S. E. 2005. "Narrative Inquiry: Multiple Lenses, Approaches, Voices." In "The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research", edited by N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln, 651-679. London: Sage). To…

Research about love in early childhood education and care is rare. Love is difficult topic to research and write about in scholarly contexts. In order to properly explore love in professional contexts, practitioner narratives on the topic were sought through individual, unstructured interviews. A spiral-patterned methodological approach was…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships among students' conceptions of knowledge building, approaches to knowledge building, knowledge-building behaviors and learning outcomes. A total of 48 primary school students (from grades 3 and 4) who had experienced knowledge-building activities participated in the present study. After…

This paper explores the affordances of using video-based research to capture a multiplicity of events, along with multimodal representations when producing data related to adult-child book readings. In doing this we answer two questions: (1) why more than one event is needed when seeking a comprehensive collection of information for the purpose of…

An exploratory study is reported of the delivery of the Early Support and Key Working (ES&KW) training program in England for multiagency professionals and parents. This qualitative study examined how ES&KW training principles and content relate to contemporary pillars in early childhood intervention; how this training is structured to…

Drawing on a recent doctoral research project that examined the everyday life perspectives during kindergarten mealtime, this paper discusses the methodological issues related to the concepts of child and adult perspectives during mealtime, and to the children's participation in research. Through the paper, we take part in a critical discussion of…

When conducting research with children it is essential to consider not only the data, which have been produced as a result of the research, but also the research process itself. This article represents an attempt to contribute the accumulation of knowledge regarding methodological and ethical issues concerning research with children. The data in…

This article considers the value of elite interviews as a frequently overlooked methodology in investigations of policymaking in early childhood education and care (ECEC). We contextualise the discussion within a study that examines constructions of quality in Australian ECEC policymaking between 1972 and 2009. We conclude that, despite their…

This article explores qualitative shadowing as an interpretivist methodology, and explains how two researchers participating simultaneously in data collection using a video recorder, contextual interviews and video-stimulated recall interviews, conducted a qualitative shadowing study at six early childhood centres in Norway. This paper emerged…

Since the 1990s, childhood researchers have become increasingly creative in their efforts to understand children's experiences in as authentic a way as possible. This article draws on a review of research methodologies across a range of projects involving 0-13 year-old children and reports on interviews with researchers which revealed real-life…