Listening to Young Children’s Voices: The Evaluation of a Coding System

Abstract

<p class="p1">Listening to young children’s voices is an issue with increasing relevance for many researchers in the field of early childhood research. At the same time, teachers and researchers are faced with challenges to provide children with possibilities to express their notions, and to find ways of comprehending children’s voices. In our research we aim to provide a method for listening to, and analyzing young children’s voices on educational issues. In this article we describe a new step in our research in which we are dealing with the issues of validity and reliability for the evaluation of our coding system: is our coding system for analyzing young children’s voices valid and reliable? </p>

Full Issue

“…Qualitative data-analysis software was used for the ongoing comparative qualitative data analysis of these transcriptions (Tertoolen, Geldens, van Oers & Popeijus, 2015;Tertoolen, van Oers, Geldens & Popeijus, 2016). We built a coding system to analyze children's expressions, based on three categories of the school context: children's attitude towards school activities, towards school organization, and towards teacher's roles, in a process of open coding (see Table 1).…”

“…preferring, commenting, collaborating, as well as teacher's actions and intentions, regarding the case-study children, e.g. initiating, complimenting, mediating (Tertoolen et al, 2015). In addition to this formal system for the analysis of children's expressions and (inter)actions, we also needed another, external, theory-based tool for the analysis of voice content.…”