Serious Sociological Games in the ELFE Cohort Study: Using Children’s Play to Gain Perspective on their Visions of the World

Abstract

Between June and December 2017, a protocol involving questionnaires designed to be enjoyable for children was implemented as part of the ELFE cohort study. This national study has followed 18,000 children since their birth in 2011. These sociological questionnaire/games aimed to collect information on the everyday preferences of young children (then aged 5-6 years old) and indicators of their moral and social sense. But this collection method had neither pre-existing experiments it could draw on, nor technology that had been fully perfected. This article revisits the methodological questions and issues that were raised over the process of developing and then administering these online questionnaires. In particular it looks at the way that social representations of childhood and research with children were raised in exchanges between sociologists and epidemiologists, or between researchers and parents.