Childhood studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Two nine-year-olds once spent most of an afternoon arguing about whether a den built from pallets and a torn tarpaulin belonged to the people who built it or to whoever was inside it. I was sitting nearby with a notebook, three weeks into fieldwork for my undergraduate dissertation, and it struck me that they were working out a theory of property more carefully than many adults would. That afternoon shaped the rest of my project and is the main reason I want to study childhood at postgraduate level.

My BA in Social Anthropology gave me a grounding in ethnographic method and in debates about structure and agency. Childhood entered my degree through a second-year module on kinship, where I read Allison James and Alan Prout's work on the new sociology of childhood. Their argument that childhood is socially constructed, and that children should be studied as active participants in social life rather than as adults in the making, changed how I read almost everything else on the course. I chose my dissertation partly to test what that argument looks like in practice.

Over eight weekly visits to a staffed adventure playground on a housing estate near my university, with consent from the charity, parents and the children themselves, I observed how children made and enforced rules. Staff had only a few fixed rules, mostly about fire and tools, so much of the order was created by the children. I found that ownership of dens was settled less by who had built them than by who could tell the most convincing story about building them, and that older girls often acted as informal judges. I was careful not to overstate what a small study could show, but my supervisor felt the analysis was strongest where I described children's reasoning in their own words. The hardest part was ethical rather than analytical: explaining to an eight-year-old what a researcher does, and accepting it when two children asked me not to write about their game.

Since graduating I have worked as a children's assistant in a public library. I run a weekly rhyme time for babies and toddlers, help with the summer reading challenge and handle the everyday questions of children who come in after school, sometimes because the library is warm and free rather than because they want books. I have become interested in libraries as one of the few public indoor spaces where children can stay without spending money, and I have kept informal notes on how their use of the building changes between term and holidays. I would like to develop this into a properly designed study of children's access to public space.

At home I collect my younger brother, who is eleven, from school three days a week while my mother works shifts. It is ordinary family life, but it has made me notice how much of a child's independence is negotiated between parents, schools and siblings, and how that varies between families on the same street. Away from work I am a keen birdwatcher, which has nothing to do with childhood except that it has taught me patience and the value of watching for a long time before deciding what I have seen.

I am looking for a programme that treats childhood as an interdisciplinary field and takes children's perspectives seriously in research design. I want to strengthen my understanding of child rights frameworks, particularly how participation rights are interpreted in practice, and to learn qualitative methods suited to different ages, including approaches beyond interviews. I would especially value studying in an international cohort, since my own evidence comes from one city in England and I want to understand how far ideas about children's independence travel. I bring careful fieldwork experience, daily contact with children in a public setting and a strong interest in learning how to do this research well.