There are undoubtedly any numbers of problems encountered when conducting a study. Here are some of the ones I may face. Questionnaires will be time consuming because I would need to design one which needs to be suitable to what I am doing and the results I want to gain. A lot of time will be needed because I will need to find and pick suitable respondents who will then have to take time to fill the questionnaire in.
When giving out questionnaires I may get a low response rate which means I will not get sufficient amount of results I need in order to do my research. This will affect the validity of my sample. I specifically need the same amount of respondents from each decade starting from the 1950’s, without this I will not be able compare each generation and the changes over time. I will need to make a questionnaire suitable for all ages that includes children, teenagers, middle-aged and the elderly, this because all the ages will be filling it in and they need to understand the questions. This could cause me problems because people may not understand the questions to answer it properly which would mean some of my results may not be reliable. Children are the age bracket that needs to be considered when designing the questionnaires because those are ones who may have difficultly in filling in the questionnaire.
Testing childhood and how it has changed can be very difficult because other factors need to be considered which will affect my results this includes affluence, the development of technology, jobs available, education, wars etc. these factors will all affect a child’s childhood which will need to be taken into consideration. All these problems will and can occur I will need to overcome these in order to get reliable and valid results.
The changes in my second concept ‘childhood’ over the generations were also caused by the changes in the family. Childhood was considered the time for a child, what should be included in it, was decided by society. There was increased affluence which allowed families to spend more money which made a child ask for more, this formed a huge commercial market for children which included things especially for them such as toys, clothes, books, television programmes etc. which separated them from their parents and they no longer looked like or were seen as mini-adults.
The younger generation were now seen as children who needed a childhood, and with this my third concept ‘child -centred’ families developed because there were less children and parents could concentrate and spend more time with their individual children. Families worked around children and so did society this included school, holidays, accommodation, finance etc. Children had to undertake 10-12 years of formal education, often learning things their parents had no knowledge of.