Looking for the infant voice. How depth hermeneutics (scenic-narrative microanalysis) contributes to an understanding of how a child participates from the beginning of life

Abstract

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) gives the right to participate and be heard in situations that affect their lives to all children, even pre-verbal children and infants. Even so, infants are often denied the right to participate because they don’t possess verbal language. But the last 50 years of infant research has shown how infants powerfully communicate their intentions in quite refined ways. The crux of the matter is to develop methods to find the voice of pre-verbal children, that is: to register their impact on us and decode their influence into common language and practical action. A research project building on intersubjectivity and qualitative methodology grounded in a depth-hermeneutical interpretation of narratives made by parents before and after birth of their first child is outlined. We describe the epistemological foundation and the procedures of the research project from data collection to interpretation.