Abstract
Comparative qualitative methodologies that investigate children’s lives in sharply contrasting socio-economic, political and welfare contexts are relatively unusual. Yet within an increasingly interdependent globalised world, comparative research and dialogue across binaries seems ever more important. In this chapter, we critically reflect on global conceptualisations of young caregiving and discuss the methodological and ethical challenges that arose in our comparative study of children caring for a parent/relative living with HIV in Tanzania and the UK. We discuss the potential problems and benefits of using the term “young carer” and suggest that levels of support and recognition of children’s caring roles in particular countries do not follow a simple Majority-Minority world binary but rather reveal a more complex picture. We argue that developing global perspectives that work across geographical, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries can facilitate greater understanding of the commonalities and diversities of children’s caring lives globally.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The terms “Minority” and “Majority” worlds are used in preference to the terms “Global North” and “Global South”, respectively, to highlight the fact that affluent societies in Europe, North America, Australia and so on comprise the minority of the world’s population, land mass and so on, while the majority of the world’s population, land mass and so on are located in low- and middle-income countries.
- 3.
The research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK 2006–2007, grant number RES-000-22-1732-A. See Evans and Becker (2009) for a discussion of the findings in global perspective.
- 4.
Ethical approval for the study was granted by the Research Ethics Committee, University of Birmingham and the National Institute for Medical Research, Tanzania. Authorisation for the research was granted by the Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology and the University of Dar es Salaam.
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Payne’s (2012) study in Zambia included some children living with a parent with alcohol use problems.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all the participants of the Tanzania-UK study discussed here, Morten Skovdal for helpful discussions and reflections and the editors for their useful feedback on an earlier version of this chapter.
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Evans, R., Becker, S. (2019). Comparing Children’s Care Work Across Majority and Minority Worlds. In: Twum-Danso Imoh, A., Bourdillon, M., Meichsner, S. (eds) Global Childhoods beyond the North-South Divide. Palgrave Studies on Children and Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95543-8_12
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