Shoulder-to-shoulder – children about the childhood

Abstract

Our empirical, interdisciplinary and comparative research has been conducted since 2018 with 4–5-year-old Russian and Hungarian kindergarteners, focusing on understanding their conception of childhood and their verbal consciousness. The research is based on two disciplinary fields – Psycholinguistics and Early Childhood research, furthermore, the methodology and the theoretical background builds on these two fields. Our methodology called on the one hand the shoulder-to-shoulder method (Griffin et al. 2014) and on the other hand the association experiment. In the theoretical background, we must mention the Moscow School of Psycholinguistics and the Conception of Childhood narrative as the starting points of the research. The research has been conducted in parallel in Moscow and Budapest, led by our research group, which after the 4–5-year-old respondent group has already started investigating the 10–12-year-old group as well. The research was funded by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research so called RFFI. This paper examines the methodology of the research.