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This article sets the scene for the other papers in this Special Issue on children's and young people's participation, by outlining the nature of the ESRC Seminar Series from which all are derived and by developing the main themes discussed at the seminars. The focus of this Issue is participation by children and young people as this relates to differing notions of social exclusion and inclusion. This article critically examines participation in the contexts of policy, practice, research and theory. In many respects the environments in each of these domains is supportive of increased participation, yet there is also much evidence of limited impact by recent participative measures and of disillusionment by many young people who have been engaged in consultation and decision-making. A way forward is suggested, which entails collaboration among all the key stakeholders including children and young people, connects participatory and social inclusion aims and mechanisms, and is committed to achieving tangible outcomes based on the wishes of children and young people.

Describes the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Children 5-16 Research Programme, a 5-year project which examined contemporary childhood in the United Kingdom, including aspects of social lives, living conditions, experiences, and perspectives. Notes specific research aims: to develop new knowledge about children as social actors, to engage in theoretical and methodological development, and in cross-disciplinary work. (Author/SD)

Reflects on idea of representing children politically and socially or culturally, drawing on themes emerging from the United Kingdom's ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) Children 5-16 Programme, a research initiative focusing on children as social actors. Explores children as research subjects, documentation of "children's standpoint," children as strategic actors, children's exclusion from decisionmaking, and construction of children's voice. (KB)

Examines children's participation in public life in relation to the tension between control and self-realization found in late modernity. Argues that social tension is created through the conflict between recognition of children as persons in their own right and public policy marked by intensification of control of children creating a view of children as human capital. (JPB)

Issues concerning caring for children with asthma and the maintenance of ordinariness in such households are discussed. Nine families with asthmatic children are discussed, and medicines were found to support the ordinariness of the child and family far more readily than other preventive measures and thus were the key resource for maintaining this quality.

Sociological interest in childhood has waxed and waned in the period since the Second World War and at the moment there seems to be something of an up-swing both in [...]

This article discusses how children, toys, and play are accommodated in the spaces of the contemporary home in order to highlight the often overlooked connections between home as an imaginative space and housing as a physical location in which people reside. We do this by exploring how families in private, new-build homes in contemporary Scotland reconfigure domestic space through the creation of a new kind of internal domestic space-the "toy room." Analysis leads to a consideration of how the rules and routines of homemaking join people, places, and things together or deliberately separate them out. We conclude that the emergence of the toy room is an improvised solution to a problem exacerbated by the growth of children's consumption of toys and playthings, shrinking room size, limited flexibility of the available space, and the shortage of storage in new-build homes, as well as a domestic aesthetic ideal adverse to clutter [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Processes of involvement and representation are particularly important in UK public services if users’ interests are adequately to be taken into account. Yet there are several different, sometimes competing ways for users’ views to be represented, and their interaction is not well understood. This article reports on research exploring these issues in relation to three public services – housing, social care and leisure services. We asked, how do public service users experience and evaluate the alternative ways in which their interests may be represented, and what factors guide their ‘choice about voice’? Mechanisms available for users to express their views can be categorised as ‘hierarchical’ (e.g. contacting elected officials); individualistic (e.g. complaints procedures); or group-based (e.g. user forums). Users make assumptions about what channel is appropriate for particular issues in a particular context. However, their ability to communicate via their chosen channel is dependent on viable opportunities to do so. This idea of viability (or lack of it) goes beyond the simple provision of a full range of channels. It relates to the prospects of users' views being recognised and accepted – and to the sense of disconnection and withdrawal that often accompanies low expectations or disappointing experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interview material, collected as part of a wider ethnographic study of sickness absence in an English primary school, is used to examine how mothers accounted for their decisions to keep children 'off school sick'. Mothers' accounts suggested a process by which they tested their children's claims on sickness against suspicions of feigning illness. The paper describes, from the mothers' point of view, the process of negotiating sickness with children and how children are categorised as 'pretending', 'upset' or 'really ill'. These decisions are set within a wider context comprising: a normative discourse of material child health care; contradictory demands placed on mothers by the image of children as simultaneously robust and vulnerable; the surveillance and contradictory demands of schooling; and the use by children of sickness as a means of exercising influence on their social situation. It is suggested that locating child health care in relation to childrens' point in their childhood career (for these children the transition to secondary school) and acknowledging the active role that children play in the construction of illness will facilitate a fuller picture of mothers' unpaid health work within the family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ideas explored in this paper were initially brought to our notice whilst analysing data derived from interviews with 15 year olds on motherhood and mental health. The aim of the paper is to explore and describe the relationship between powerful social norms about motherhood and the ideas and knowledge which the 15 year olds in our study revealed to us, ideas which often contradict the normative view. Our own data will be used to show some of the ways in which 15 year olds appear to negotiate for themselves, and attempt to resolve, the contradictions between normative and self-experienced knowledge about motherhood. In doing this we will be especially concerned to describe some of the solutions the girls develop. We have data on the same themes for boys, collected in the same way. For reasons of space we were unable to look at this in detail but want to write it up more fully at a later date. Our analysis will stress the active role that children play in the construction of their own views and futures rather than a more straightforwardly deterministic model which would see children as products of a social culture. We intend to relate this data to recent research on motherhood and depression and to some reflections on how normative conceptions come to be reproduced and socially maintained, focusing on the. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines how sickness as a cultural performance might be analysed as a dominant symbol within life course transitions. The concept of dominant symbol is taken from Victor Turner's framework for Symbolic Processual Analysis in ritual and pilgrimage and is used to interrogate data collected in an ethnographic study of sickness absence in an English primary school. It is suggested that sickness played a central part in the construction of meaning around the transition from primary to secondary school. The performance of sickness seemed to condense ideological features (especially those of gender and work discipline) and to express modulations in the meaning of the transition in its different phases. The concept of dominant symbol (and the related notion of liminality) illuminate these data but need modification to take account of the unritualised and fragmented character of many life course transitions in contemporary Western societies. It is suggested that with modification these concepts might be applied to the meaning of sickness in other life course transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The material presented here is drawn from a wider ethnographic study of children's sickness absence in a primary school. The particular aspect deals with concerns how children's claims on sickness are handled by teachers and other school staff. Teachers' typifications of the childrearing practices of the parents, especially the description of the children as 'wet', and the project that flows from it, are suggested as the framework in which teachers interpret the children's claims. These are shown to be differentiated according to gender and age and placed in the context of the move to secondary school as a key symbolic moment in the transition to adulthood. It is suggested that an ethnographic approach can significantly illuminate the processes and practices underlying (mainly American) questionnaire and attitude studies of the acquisition of sick role conceptions by children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the perspective on childhood's role in cultural reproduction stemmed from a particular conception of children. Derived initially from the Puritan view of the child as essentially other, western philosophical perspectives on children's nature were given scientific respectability through the gradual domination of developmental psychology in discourses about children. This stressed the naturalness of children by arguing for the determining role of biology in shaping children's physical and psychologically development. Theoretical frameworks that are the most useful in ethnography are therefore those, which are sufficiently abstract to have a wide application but at the same time readily translatable into the particularities of a given social milieu. Cultures can be placed on a continuum running at one end from highly structured environments, when individuals have little scope for negotiating their courses of action with others and are caught in a tight grid of ascribed behavior, to those social environments which are only loosely structured. In the latter, behavior is open to individual preference and is highly negotiable with others in the social field.