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Children and Young People in Families

This chapter studies children and young people in families. Throughout most of the twentieth century, psychology and its associated field of child development were lead disciplines in the study of children and childhood, just as psychology led the way in youth studies. In the 1980s and early 1990s, interest in childhood as a field of study was already firmly established among Scandinavian and US social scientists; the UK was a relative latecomer to the field. These social scientists afforded children ‘conceptual autonomy’, identified children as a distinct group in society, and viewed childhood as socially constructed. They considered children as social actors within a diversity of social contexts, not only as family members. The approach of Danish researcher Jens Qvortrup and his colleagues was path breaking. It drew attention to three social processes shaping children's lives: institutionalisation, familialisation, and individualisation. The chapter then considers the use of participatory research methods in childhood research.