CUNY Academic Commons

Research with Children and Youth

This seminar is designed for students who have identified a research question involving children, childhood or youth and who wish to explore alternative ways of conceptualizing it and investigating it. It is designed in line with the growing interdisciplinary field of child and youth studies. Students from psychology, the social sciences, education and the humanities are invited to participate. Seminar participants may be at the very earliest conceptualizing their work and even still defining their question or they may already be in the process of designing methods, or they may even be at the stage of interpreting their findings and see the potential value of gaining perspective from other disciplines. We will rotate discussion around each participant’s developing research and work collectively to interrogate it from the perspective of different disciplines. Even when we believe that we have clarity about our research there is value in thinking about it from across disciplines. This may result in enriching the research by combining different disciplinary perspectives within a single study or even transcending disciplinary knowledge through a new integration of theory. Either way, it is likely to deepen our research endeavor.

An additional component of the seminar will be to ask how our research might be differently conceptualized given different possible audiences and end goals, including research that is primarily focused on theory-building, on influencing policy or on action and more immediate change. Again, this is based in the belief that a research project need not be limited to only one of these orientations. Throughout the course the seminar participants will share written commentaries with one another as we explore alternative perspectives on research questions and what this might mean for the design of the research.