Abstract:

Doing research with young (preschool) children is still a relatively new field of scientific exploration that holds multiple challenges. Young children, for example, may understand complex words but are not fully capable of expressing themselves since their language skills are still developing. Furthermore, they have not yet developed sufficient cognitive ability to provide reflective responses. Therefore, research projects with young children must consider these aspects and focus their methods on the child participant (Hartnack 2009). This means children should not be overburdened. Also, their expressiveness and reflectivity have to be taken into account when working with them (Petermann & Windmann 1993; Butschi & Hedderich 2021). At the same time, researchers have to consider that children are experts in their living environment and act as reporters about their lives (Hunger et al. 2019). One popular method to do qualitative research with children at preschool age is the puppet interview (Ablow & Measelle 1993; Weise 2021). However, puppet interviews show several deficiencies. For example, on the structural level as children have to reflect less on their answers (Tkotzyk & Marci-Boehncke 2022). This deficit is particularly problematic when it comes to more complex topics and knowledge queries, such as the issue of young children's civic literacy (Alscher, Ludewig & McElvany 2022) and the influence of media use on it.

Therefore, this paper wants to introduce the picturizing strategy as a new interview method that activates and challenges participants’ reflective capacity playfully. The picturizing strategy, initially introduced as Picture Concept Maps (Tkotzyk & Marci-Boehncke 2022), was developed within an interdisciplinary research project at the TU Dortmund University in Germany to interview young children about their media and civic literacy. As the name indicates, the methodology involves working with different images and symbols and uses the strategy approach from Game Studies. The method is based to some extent on the concept mapping method (Novak 1990). It also uses the ecosystem of Bronfenbrenner (1990) for structuring to generate supercategories. A first test has shown that preschool children are stimulated in a playful way to talk about different topics (categories) of the object of investigation and to reflect on their selection, among other things, by the visualized structure.

Using examples from the research project, this paper will explain how this method works, how it is structured, and how it can be applied in early childhood research.

Keywords:

Picturizing strategy, early childhood research, interview method, research method.