Researching Children and Youth: Methodological Issues, Strategies, and Innovations, part of the Sociological Studies of Children and Youth series, seeks to fill a void in current publications directly addressing the problems and pitfalls that often accompany researching children and youth in today’s society. Sociologists face increasingly limited access to children and youth given their “vulnerable” status, growing requirements from Institutional Review Boards, and more restricted access from organizations and educational institutions. As a result, researchers must be creative in the pursuit of researching kids and teens. Chapters in this volume address such topics as participatory and feminist ethnographic approaches, digital mining, children’s agency, and navigating IRBs. The importance of contextualizing sociological research with children with special consideration of space, location, and identity thematically runs throughout all of the contributions to this volume.

Sociologists, criminologists, and other social scientists explore some of the methodological issues, strategies, and innovations essential to conducting research with children and youth. During the past four decades, they say, theoretical constructions of childhood have positioned children as social actors, resulting in a growth of child-centered and youth-centered empirical research, a deepened understanding of ethical approaches, and a burst of innovative research methods. Among their topics are maneuvering the stormy waters of ethnography in an inner-city school: reflections from the field, researcher as college coach: dilemmas and possibilities in fieldwork with adolescents, sharpening theory and methodology to explore racialized youth peer cultures, and learning about inequality from kids: interviewing strategies for getting beneath equality rhetoric. -- Annotation ©2017 * (protoview.com) *

Ingrid E. Castro, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, North Adams, MA, USA Melissa Swauger, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA, USA Brent Harger, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA, USA Loretta E. Bass, The University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA