Quality Research on Children's Play

Johan Meire Childhood & Society Research Centre Nieuwelaan 63, 1860 Meise, BELGIUM Tel.: ++ 32 2 272 07 53 - E-mail: [e-mail]

Qualitative research on children´s play:
A review of recent literature This presentation is a review of the recent, English-language (mostly peer reviewed) qualitative research on children’s play. It focuses on the place play has in children’s experience and giving sense to the world. Thus, it will leave aside the large and important body of research on the effect or outcomes (benefits and possible harmful consequences) of play which however tells us little on why children like to play so much and in particular on why they play so intensively, on why they are so much absorbed by play. A much more elaborate version of the review will appear in the new edited ICCP book on children’s play. Here, I will focus on just some of the recent contributions and trends in the field; I will not consider methodologies, although the recent turn to visual methods (especially photography) as complementing the very diverse observational methods, should certainly be mentioned in this context (Burke, 2005; Kernan, 2005). In reviewing research on children’s play in the field of folklore, Ackerley (2003, 11) notes a “trend away from the consideration of what children play, to the investigation of why and how these folklore traditions are kept alive”. The comprehensive collections of children’s games “have given way to greater consideration of the conditions under which such play occurs”. This is not only true for studies of ‘child lore’, but for qualitative studies of children’s play in general. Recent research has started to give us a more detailed and more nuanced view of ‘how’ children play – the research on play and gender is a good illustration of this –, while research on children’s own experiences and sense-giving complement the longer established instrumental perspective on ‘why’ children (should) play. This is also related to a somewhat more

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