Gina Crivello

• University of Oxford

This article explores the changing place of ‘motherhood’ in the lives of girls and young women in Ethiopia, from a generational, life course perspective. It focuses on ‘motherhood in childhood’ in the context of rapid social change, drawing on multi-generational narratives from young women, their mothers and grandmothers, as part of Young Lives, a...

This article asks why some children growing up in poverty seem to fare well, despite the odds being stacked against them early in life. The data come from Young Lives, a 15-year mixed methods study of childhood poverty tracing the trajectories of a cohort of boys and girls (n = 4,000) born in 1994 in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam. We use survey...

There is growing interest in the potential value of qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) for shedding light on temporal dimensions of experience and on the way personal biographies are shaped by social structures and processes over time. This chapter outlines some of the definitions, designs, advantages, and challenges in relation to QLR, focusi...

This article examines young Peruvians’ aspirations and the role of migration in their imagined futures, from a generational perspective. The data come from Young Lives, a long-term study of childhood poverty combining survey and qualitative approaches with children and their parents. The paper uses a biographical approach that sees migration as par...

This paper draws on data from Young Lives, a longitudinal study of childhood poverty, to explore how international development research might be strengthened by including qualitative longitudinal research (QLR). We review three problems in development studies: (a) the relatively low status of qualitative research within the hierarchy of development...

There is growing interest in the potential value of qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) for shedding light on temporal dimensions of experience and on the way personal biographies are shaped by social structures and processes over time. This chapter outlines some of the definitions, designs, advantages, and challenges in relation to QLR, focusi...

Drawing on data from Peru, this article explores how poverty mediates diverse risks in rural children's lives. It offers four main arguments. First, risk is not simply a feature of ‘extraordinary’ childhoods, but integral to everyday, ‘ordinary’ lives. Second, children's responses to adversity are crucially shaped by sociomoral considerations. Thir...

‘Children’s agency’ and ‘children as social actors’ have become taken for granted in much social science research (James 2009). In studies on childhood, agency has been accepted as a universal feature of what it means to be a child, and in international development, ‘children’s participation’ is an increasingly accepted principle (Vandenbroeck and...

'Orphans' became a category of vulnerable children deserving special protection in the context of the global AIDS epidemic, and currently the notion of 'orphans and vulnerable children' (OVC), dominates much of the policy for protecting children across sub-Saharan Africa. Analysis of survey and qualitative data from Young Lives in Ethiopia found th...

Poverty is one of the most significant adversities confronted by children around the world today. Young Lives aims to improve understanding of the dynamics, causes and consequences of childhood poverty and provide evidence to support the development of effective policies for reducing it and breaking enduring poverty cycles. The study of risk and pr...

This chapter reports on research carried out with boys and girls, aged 12 to 15, participating in Young Lives in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. It focuses on young people’s descriptions, explanations, and experiences of poverty and inequality in two contrasting rural communities and highlights implications for research, policy and pra...

The past few decades have witnessed international pressure to get more children in the world educated, for longer. The view that school education is core to definitions of good childhoods and successful youth transitions is increasingly widespread, globally and locally. However, structural inequalities persist and migration for education has become...

Throughout the world, children experience and manage risk as a part of their everyday lives. But growing up poor may be a particular source of vulnerability and disadvantage for children, especially where they are confronted with gross inequalities. The global challenge is huge. By 2015, it is estimated that nearly one-third of the world’s populati...

The authors review the contribution of qualitative methods to exploring concepts and experiences of wellbeing among children and adults living in developing countries. They provide examples illustrating the potential of these methods for gaining a holistic and contextual understanding of people’s perceptions and experiences. Some of these come from...

‘Wellbeing’ is a key concept in the study of children’s lives over time, given its potential to link the objective, subjective, and inter-subjective dimensions of their experiences in ways that are holistic, contextualized and longitudinal. For this reason wellbeing is one of the core concepts used by Young Lives, a 15-year project (2000–2015) that...

Incl. bibl., abstract. This article aims to address a number of conceptual and methodological challenges facing the study of young refugees. Much of the research on refugees has, until recently, been focused on adults, and to a lesser degree, on young children. Those studies that do include children are largely carried out in the domain of psycholo...

Young people migrate for a number of different reasons, including poverty and economic deprivation. The relation between migration and poverty is complex. Migration is sometimes seen as a threat to local ways of life, but it is also seen as a source of positive change for individuals and communities. Migration-for-education is a growing trend, as m...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2003. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 321-342).

This paper explores diverse pathways through early childhood in the context of Andhra Pradesh state, India. The particular focus is on experiences of pre-school and transitions to primary school. The paper is based on analysis of Young Lives survey data (n=1950) collected for a group of young children born at the beginning of the millennium, plus i...

Incl. bibl.