Paper short abstract:

We reflexively discuss methodological strategies used with children across different projects centered on "new" families in Spain. We pay particular attention to three processes: (a) negotiations around/within interviews; (b) the place of visual materials; (c) workshop events for data collection.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last decade we have been involved in a series of research projects in Spain focused on processes of "new" (Golombok, 2015; Rivas, 2009) family formation. These projects were conceived as multi-sited team ethnographies involving complex fieldwork process that included participant observation in different institutional settings, on-line ethnography, detailed analysis of legal and institutional documentations or extensive interviewing of different actors involved in these family projects: professionals, fathers/mothers, children and, more recently, donors.

The individual techniques used across these projects are not construed as particularly innovative or developed outside the rich toolkit of ethnographic methodology. Yet, in this communication we focus in particular on the methodological processes that emerged when working with children in an attempt to explore their own perspectives regarding their family experiences. We reflexively examine three processes: (a) negotiations with parents as the first interlocutors in the process and gatekeepers but also negotiations with children as they emerged within interviews; (b) how visual materials generated by the children were used as interview prompts or complementary analytical material; (c) how workshop-type events and literary narratives were used and generated in the research projects. Within these projects on new/non-conventional family formation in Spain, children emerged as "hard to reach" participants (in comparison to the accessibility of parents and adults) and in this communication we open up the discussion to the different strategies we developed to confront these obstacles and how we -not always successfully- extended and experimented with conventional research techniques to work with children.