Typology of Research Methods in Environmental Studies about Children

Children are different from adults in physical and psychological aspects. They use different physical spaces and facilities too and therefore they should be expected to experience different perception and evaluation of the environment rather than adult users. The existing study shows that designers, planners and psychologists have paid special attention to know how children and adults perceive and behave in their environments. However, the theories and observations have not been able yet to achieve a deep scientific response to understand children’s world. Children lack sufficient experience of various spaces. Therefore, it seems that examining the perceptive and cognitive capabilities of children with respect to space can yield better understanding and selection of the research methods. Meanwhile, it is important and necessary to understand the scientific methods of research on children, as prerequisites for selecting these methods. There is an extensive need to a valid and reliable approach, which may be named as “scientific approach”, in the mentioned field. The main objective of this article is to explore the way of scientific research is conducted on children subjects and to introduce some of the suitable framework and methods of environmental studies about children in hypothesized environments. Ideally, this manuscript would be able to respond to major questions associated with selection of suitable data collection and analysis methods, once the research problem and objectives in an environment of interest and the age group of interest were determined. Assuming that ability to carry out active discovery in an environment boosts the spatial perception of children, this article aim to clarify research in environmental studies of children, first by exploring the way spatial knowledge is obtained by children at various developmental stages. At the second step, the article introduces various scientific approaches within positivist (quantitative) and constructivism (qualitative) paradigms in the related environmental studies, in order to shed light on these approaches and show how they are subject to prejudice and subjective interpretation. Due to the importance of application of qualitative approaches in understanding the children’s world which can yield optimum understanding as a result of dialectic interaction of the environment with children’s minds. The article will finally present some of the qualitative methods of research which suitable for various developmental stages of children. The authors conclude that creativity in a research process depends on the application of mixed approaches and implementation ofa spectrum of research methods on children’s experiences, simultaneously. This will provide the opportunity for supplementary understanding, difficult to achieve by reliance on a single data collection method. The outcome of this article is a presentation of the typology of research methods in the mentioned issue.