Are Children Interviewees Just Like Any Others?

Abstract

Based on a study combining qualitative and quantitative methods on children’s relation to politics, this article discusses the specificities of childhood as a research object in the social sciences. It raises two key issues. The first relates to the aptitudes required to participate in research (and thus the reliability of children’s responses) and the second relates to the potential imbalance in the research relationship. The article demonstrates that the difficulties encountered depend on the social characteristics of the children and are not specific to this age group. They primarily result from the distance between the interviewer and the interviewee, in this case stemming from the age difference sometimes accentuated by social distance. Children can be considered social beings like any others, and their specificities can be usefully analysed using the traditional tools of the social sciences.