Reading the Life Narratives of Children and Youth

When my collaborator Anna Poletti and I wrote our book Life Narratives
and Youth Cultures, we wrote a short section to conclude the introduction
titled, “A Brief Note on Method and the Ethics of Studying Youth”. In
this short statement, we carefully and self-consciously explained how our
study of young people’s life narrative would work at the intersection of
different disciplines, namely, literary and cultural studies and childhood
and youth studies. We explained that overt discussion of research methodologies
was expected in research on childhood and youth because there
are always ethical questions surrounding, for instance, the appropriateness
of studying children and youth. We acknowledged that even though
ours was not qualitative or quantitative research of child subjects, engaging
with the life narratives of young people requires ethical methodologies,
and, more particularly, ethical strategies for the reading and analysis
of and writing about youth-authored works.