Navigating child well-being research in institutional settings: children with intellectual disability and children in care

Navigating child well-being research in institutional settings: children with intellectual disability and children in ca In this chapter, we have specified the relevant contexts for undertaking our fieldwork. These include our own biographies as practitioners and research academics, the fieldwork setting, symbolic representations of childhood relevant to specific fieldwork settings and experiences of marginalization for our research participants. In particular we have tried to demonstrate that institutional contexts, spaces and social relations constitute the processes that contribute to children’s voices, as we hear them, and ‘their situated and variable character’. It is within ‘institutional contexts and the cultural and social norms that regulate social relations in them, that children’s voices take shape as the respective characteristics (such as age, gender, ethnicity, race, and ability), interests and agendas of the researcher meet with those of the child to produce particular voices’ (Spyrou, 2011, p 156, citing Freeman and Mathison, 2009).