Purpose: Sociometric studies and adult reports have established that children with Language Disorder (LD) are at risk of peer relationship difficulties. However, we have limited knowledge of how children with LD understand friendship, whom they deem as a good or bad friend, and what role their friendship concepts play in their relationships with…

The UK-based article develops a quantitative method for measuring 8-9-year-old children's Gender Ability Beliefs through drawings, assessing the reliability and validity of the measure and its association with respondents' self-reported gender. The measure, originally used in the US by Beilock et al. (2010), required respondents to draw two…

Whilst the importance of engaging with children's voices is now more widely recognized, there is still a dearth of representation of younger children's voices specifically. Visual methodological tools, such as photo-elicitation and photo-voice are used in research; however, there remains a lack of clarity about what they mean, how they are used,…

Background and aims: Autistic children can experience challenges in making and maintaining friendships, and middle childhood (ages 6-12) may be particularly challenging as social networks become more complex. However, a large proportion of research into these experiences is based on adult reports or focuses on the experiences of adolescents,…

A problematic way to think about social categories is to essentialize them--to treat particular differences between people as marking fundamentally distinct social kinds. From where do these beliefs arise? Language that expresses generic claims about categories elicits some aspects of essentialism, but the scope of these effects remains unclear.…

During the pandemic-related school closures and lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, listening to stories, whether through audiobooks or podcasts, was a lifeline for many children and adults (see Best & Clark, 2020 and Best, Clark, Perry & Riad, 2022). Around this time, the National Literacy Trust also began asking children and young people about…

This article traces the emergence of the term 'turbulence' to describe the educational disruption experienced by military children after 1945. It asks why the term came to dominate professional discussion of military education so much from the late 1960s onwards and the wider tensions it exposed in post-war Britain: between welfare and warfare;…

Listening to children's experiences of writing during the first lockdown in spring 2020, it became clear that for many it had been a time of increased creativity, with children writing everything from songs and stories to scripts, and some even beginning their own novels. Another prominent theme in the research last summer was that having more…

With increasing concerns in the UK about the positive mental well-being and flourishing of children, this research, using drama and creative writing with primary school teachers, children and a theatre company, looks at the links between creative processes and children's well-being. This pedagogy applies a capability approach and we use this lens…

Subtle language and communication difficulties are persistent and pervasive for autistic individuals without intellectual disability. They are thought to impact negatively on functionality, social interrelations and emotional well-being, although this relationship is under-explored in the literature. The personal accounts of autistic children…

This article explores methodological and ethical issues of researching with children, drawing on a project exploring children's perceptions of having a mother studying in Higher Education. While most prior research concentrates on a mother's view of her children, this article uniquely focuses on children's views on their mother. From analysis of…

The National Literacy Trust's research during the first national lockdown in spring 2020 showed that more children and young people said that they enjoyed reading and more read more often during lockdown compared with before the pandemic. Children and young people's comments suggested that this was because they suddenly had time to (re)engage with…

Previous research indicates that imagining contact with someone who is an immigrant can reduce prejudice and promote positive friendship intentions. Much less is known about the optimal ways of effecting imagined contact. The reported research used an experimental design, where the status of a target-child toy puppet (immigrant versus refugee…

New research from UNICEF Innocenti and Western Sydney University explores the question: what does well-being mean to children in a digital age? This first-phase report prioritises the voices of children, collected through workshops with over 300 children from 13 countries along with analysis of existing survey data from 34,000 children aged 9-17…

In this article I compare two studies, one pre- and one post-COVID-19, to consider the ethics of researching with children, especially during uncertain times. I argue that ethics are entwined with assumptions about children, 'voice', relational dynamics and representation. To reflect upon those assumptions and their ethical implications, I draw…