Prendre l’âge en considération dans les méthodes qualitatives. Une tentative d’explicitation
Brossard, Baptiste;
sociologies2017pp. -
336
brossard2017prendresociologies
Abstract
How to take into consideration the age of the participants in qualitative research? This article addresses the question, based on the reading of some sociological and anthropological publications, and of the author’s fieldwork studies conducted among adolescents and elderly people. It advances a relational perspective on age, in the sense that this variable is not grasped as an individual feature, but rather as a certain aspect of the interaction, revealing both a form of (material as well as symbolic) domination relationship and of “staging of the self”. First, this paper reviews the different ways in which research objects and fieldwork may be constructed and delimited according to the age of the participants. Second, it proposes a reading grid aiming to formalize the analysis of age relationships: if age implies a staging of domination relationship, what are its observable clues? Can we make them explicit in order to facilitate fieldwork and its reflexive analysis?