Four pathways towards understanding children's wellbeing

Doing qualitative research is most often associated with interviews and focus groups, particularly when attempting to understand the different perspectives of individuals or groups or ways in which the social world is constructed in discourse. However, such methods draw heavily on verbalization of experiences, thoughts and feelings, at once prioritizing language over other forms of sensing and making sense of the world and deriving understandings from ‘artificial’ acts of communication. This paper presents a comparison of four different qualitative methods used to understand children’s wellbeing in schools. The research begins from the premise that interview data can provide understandings of wellbeing, but these can be extended by collection of other data drawn from experiential walks and daily diaries as well as artwork and personal accounts. Data suggest that while interviews encapsulate wellbeing in rather cognitively oriented ways, experiential walks tie wellbeing into environmental experiences, while diaries highlight the dynamic changes in wellbeing over the day and artwork and personal accounts are characterized by highly emotive expressions of wellbeing. This research shows how academic discourses of children’s wellbeing can be highly influenced by the method chosen to collect data. More inclusive understandings of wellbeing require a range of different approaches to access the myriad of ways wellbeing is manifest in children’s everyday lives.