Concepts
The thinking behind the project draws together several related strands and areas of interest.
First, we wished to focus on childhood as an important life stage in its own right, rather than as a preparation for adulthood. Social research on children is often concerned with the implications of certain experiences in childhood for ‘outcomes’ in later life – for example whether childhood poverty affects educational attainment. These are very important issues. However childhood, while it has different meanings and definitions in different contexts, is a significant and substantial period in people’s lives and merits consideration in itself, and not only because of how it may affect later life stages.