This article presents a reflexive analysis of the methods of investigation that I have used over twelve years of research on children and youth socialisation at different school levels. The desire to free myself from an "adult-centred" position that prevents researchers to reach the specific categories of children's social experience has led me to develop multiple research tools adapted to these social actors. Children do not behave, it is true, as accomplished adults, but they wish, as them, to analyse and redefine at their advantage the situational constraints that they meet individually or collectively. To understand the trials they are confronted to and the meaning they give to them I have used ethnographic interviews, but I have also conceived scripts from which children can perfectly express well-developed conceptions of justice and politics. The analysis of key incidents or "affairs" that confront children to adults has also allowed me to put forward some propositions concerning their group sociability at different points in their school careers. Finally, the examination of some dimensions of schoolwork such as "long" written texts has led me to analyse a relationship to school "knowledge" that life stories usually neglect. In all these research studies, I have tried to combine qualitative and quantitative approaches rather than opposing them in the hope of both gaining insight and being able to generalise.
Socialisation; Children; Youth; School; Methodology