A Case for Children’s Film

Abstract

The nature of this study was a small scale, qualitative research project which drew on the experiences of six children in one school, in a large city in the UK. It was never my intention to produce research which attempted to generalise about the particular experiences of these children to make inferences about the wider population. As Cohen, Manion and Morrison (2007) point out, this would amount to attempting to apply the measures of reliability of quantitative work to qualitative work. I aim to avoid drawing on the rhetoric (Firestone, 1987) of quantitative methodologies, particularly in relation to the making of generalisations. Regardless of scale or paradigm, or claims to be ‘evidence-based’, as we hear in everyday discussions of education, research can only present data which are particular to the researchers, the context and the research participants at a particular time and context (Wellington, 2000). The limitations and criticisms of qualitative work are often the result of inappropriately applying quantitative criteria. To evaluate qualitative work thoughtfully and rigorously, the tools of appraisal should stem from the qualitative paradigm:

Qualitative methods express the assumptions of a phenomenological paradigm that there are multiple realities that are socially defined. (Firestone, 1987, p. 16)