Understanding Children's Lives: How children and parents experience and understand social and health inequalities

Abstract

Children's differing social circumstances and experiences are part of the pathways implicated in health and illness in adulthood. However, children's own perspectives tend to be absent from adult-defined data about health and illness. Little is known about social and cultural processes in childhood; even less is known about children's own agency in making sense of and recreating the health cultures in which they grow up. This research into children's lives was developed to address such gaps in research, interviewing children and parents in two contrasting localities.