Research as Play: Using Participatory and Multimodal Ethnographic Methods with Young Children

Research with young children can present a range of challenges including involving them meaningfully in the research process and facilitating their authentic communication with researchers. This talk will share experiences of conducting playful ethnographic research with young children that is participatory, giving children an active and agentive role in creating data, and multimodal, where communication is understood as involving multiple modes beyond language.

This approach will be illustrated with examples from two projects researching children’s contemporary play practices. Firstly, ‘Playing the Archive’, which included an ethnographic study exploring the playground play of children aged 5-11 in two London primary schools using a wide range of creative methods such as drawing, map-making, child-to-child interviews and video recordings of various kinds. Secondly, from ‘The Play Observatory’, a subsequent project studying the play experiences of children aged 0-18 throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, where participatory and multimodal methods were adapted into an entirely online research design, including surveys, online family interviews and children’s film-making. Both studies illustrate the possibilities of incorporating innovative digital technologies into the data collection process and the potentials of multimodal analysis for offering insights into children’s complex, layered playworlds. It will be argued that ethnographic, participatory and multimodal approaches can be particularly apt for supporting a range of playful, child-centred methods and an orientation towards ‘research as play’, allowing for flexibility and surprise in the research process, encouraging experimentation with tools and technologies, attuning to the messy vitality of everyday life, and inviting moments where boundaries between research and play are blurred and blended.