Institutional Analysis and Biographical Method
During the last 20 years most young danish children are into day-care institutions already at the age of 1-2 year. Children spend a lot of time in institutions and perciece many importent impressions and experiences by their institutional life. Although this is a fact, we until now have almost very little knowledge about the traces of childrens institutionalized lifes.
The research project “Traces of Childrens Institutional Life! - a project belonging to the new sociological childhood research with it’s focus on children as social actors and it’s intention to let children participate as informants, gather informations about the institutional life from 46 young people between 16-24 years. The open question put forward to the participants was: What do you remember from your life in day-care institutions? The project used a triangel of methods: the young people wrote down in narratives their recollections and expiriences, afterwards they were interviewed, and 10 of the young people reviewed their old day-care institution while guiding the researchers around and telling about their memories.
Those biographical inspired methods has been useful in this kind of institutional analysis. The biographical method bring us both importent informations about each single individual as well as important informations about the day-care institution, when the empirical material from each of the participants is brought together in a way which makes it possible to observe patterns and tendencies in it. The methods makes it possible too, representing the children as creative actors not passive victims. The methods support the childs view and expirience innate the young peoples accounts - but at the expence of the professionals. If empirical reseach in the future must investigate long time lasting traces of day-care institutions or other related institutions, we will recommand a triple method like the one used in this study.
