Our Ideas on PCEs

We aim to co-create emergent research with children and caregivers, to map the universe of Positive Childhood Experiences from their perspectives.

Inductive Research

We will begin our research inductively, that is, with no front-loaded concepts, ideas, or theories. We’ll start our research by simply asking children and caregivers questions such as, “How would you define positive childhood experiences? How do you know them when you live them?.”

Emergent Research

We are incredibly inspired by Emergent Strategy, a book by adrienne maree brown. She inspired us to conceptualize something what we call emergent research. What is it? We don’t know. But we’ll find out. Our initial thoughts are linked below.

Emergent Resesarch

Deductive Research

We will begin our research inductively, and emergently. But we have some clear ideas about Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) and childhood traumas. We don’t know exactly what children and caregivers will say when we ask them to help us map the universe of PCEs, so we will begin each research session by asking them to define PCEs on their terms - and shutting up, and listening.

After we ask them, though, we also want to check in with them on our ideas, our concepts, the conceptual framework for our research. Our conceptual framework, which is still emerging, focuses on four core concepts: Love, Identity, Fury, and Enjoyment - which we abbreviate as LIFE.

We plan to invite research participants to dialogue about each of these four areas, in a focus group setting, using a card game that we are developing, The Game of Life (we know, terrible joke!).

A few seeds of our conceptual framework can be found in the documents linked below.