Research with children: A participant observational case Turkey

Researching with children can be challenging due to the gatekeepers in reaching out to them and children’s own ways of constructing meanings that are different than those of adult world. Participant observational approach in child- hood research is one of the methodologies to reduce challenges in childhood research. This paper aims to address several methodological problems faced during a participant observational fieldwork of a research on children’s privacy in Tur- key. The research aimed to explore how privacy relations among children, parents and siblings are constructed in their everyday lives at home settings. It drew on in-depth interviews with 33 families (with components of 11 to 13-year-old children, parents and siblings) in ten urban and rural neighborhoods in Eskişehir in Turkey, along with the revisits (n=42) following the interviews. Revisits included participatory activities with children such as playing online games together, making TikTok videos, going to museums and playgrounds, looking at family photos and preparing dinners together. In- terviews were voice-recorded and all meetings were reported through ethnographic notes. This paper discusses two major challenges faced throughout the fieldwork. First challenge concerned with the re- search topic. The social construction of the concept privacy varies depending on cultures. In Turkey it is often associated with morality, sexuality and intimacy. Islamic connotations are often embedded in this concept as well. However, this empirical research addresses privacy under two strands based on Westin, Altman and Schoeman's definitions: First, pri- vacy is examined as a management of contact as desired (Altman, 1975; Westin, 1967 cited in Petronio, 2002) Secondly, it is addressed as one’s control on access to personal information (Schoeman, 2007; Petronio, 2002). The gap between its socially constructed meanings and its theoretical definitions appeared at times as an obstacle in researcher’s transition to participation in family’s everyday culture. Second challenge faced was related to the authority relations between adults and children involved in the research. This research dealt with children’s physical, emotional and intellectual spaces, in other words children’s privacy within the unequal relations between family components in Turkey. Children are often addressed as vulnerable minors and de- pendents in dichotomy with adulthood. In contemporary Turkey as well, children’s social position tends to be defined through the power relations with adults (Sunar and Fişek, 2005), which challenged the researcher’s attempt to minimize authority attributions. Researching a delicate topic like privacy, the researcher needed to avoid seeming intimidating in her approach to children. Yet certain culturally-demanded way of addressing elder people by children, such as ‘abla’ (el-der sister) and certain ‘respect’ understandings reproduced power hierarchies.