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There are three main analytic challenges to studying kids, especially where the core focus is inequality: (1) minimizing the power imbalance between adults/researchers and kids/participants, (2) attending to the active and imaginative communication styles of young people, and (3) getting beneath the superficial rhetoric of meritocracy, colorblindness, and post-feminism. In this chapter, we draw from our own qualitative insights when studying middle school kids (grades 6–8, ages 11–14) in providing a systematic analysis of the effectiveness of distinct visual strategies and their respective strengths and limitations for producing rich, useful, and specific data. The insights gleaned are applicable to analyses of kids, understandings of inequality, and even methodological training.

This chapter presents the broad themes of this special issue by introducing the contributions and connections among the chapters in the volume. Recent theoretical constructions of childhood have positioned children as social actors resulting in a growth of child- and youth-centered empirical research. Yet, there is a continued importance for researchers to discuss ethical issues that arise in research with youth, contend with the competing constructions of children as social agents and in need of protection, and explore innovative methodological strategies used in research with youth.

In this chapter, I focus on two methodological issues involved with conducting ethnographies of very young children; establishing a researcher role in preschool classrooms while simultaneously gaining access into children’s culture and the trust of adult gatekeepers involved (i.e., teachers). Drawing on my participant observation experiences in 10 preschool classrooms (over 470 hours and 19 months of observations), I challenge the use of the friend role (Fine & Sandstrom, 1988) and least-adult role (Mandell, 1988) in research with young children. I examine how teachers mediate the researcher’s role in participant observation of children in preschool classrooms demonstrating the importance of establishing a middle manager role between teachers and children when conducting participant observations. I also discuss strategies used to overcome adult’s mediation of the researcher’s role, and strategies for simultaneously gaining teachers and children’s rapport in participant observation research in ways that formulate positive relationships with adults and children. I demonstrate the importance of researcher reflexivity of children’s and adults’ assessments of researchers’ roles in the field, highlighting how researchers’ impacts on children are not dependent on the times they are present in the field. Instead, I show that children continue to critically assess researchers’ positionality and roles in the field, often times seeking the help of adults (i.e., parents and teachers), further stressing the need for researchers to negotiate an understanding of their roles with both adults and children prior to and while in the field.