Peer-reviewed article
Being a (Female) Child in Baku: Social Order and Understandings of Well-Being
Christine Hunner-Kreisel, Nigar Nasrullayeva, Stefan Kreisel, Aysel Sultan, Doris Bühler-Niederberger ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-sonnet-5-5This qualitative study asks what it means to be a girl in Baku, Azerbaijan, and how girls understand their own well-being. The researchers interviewed 13 girls during their leisure activities. Parents, and mothers in particular, were the girls' main reference persons, and the girls had few spaces or trusted adults outside their families. The study describes how the girls view adults' social practices and how far they comply with them. It uses these views to reflect on welfare state structures and where children are placed within them.
Key points
- Qualitative interviews were conducted with 13 girls during their leisure activities.
- Parents, especially mothers, are the girls' key reference persons.
- There are hardly any spaces the girls can explore, or reference persons outside their immediate families.
- Girls justify some adult practices through a sort of complicity with adultist structures (competent compliance).
- Girls accept other adult practices because of their own vulnerabilities as children (compliance and constitutive vulnerability), while others irritate them and are rejected or sabotaged (fragile compliance).
Limitations
The study is based on 13 girls in one city, so it cannot show how common these views are among children elsewhere in Azerbaijan or among boys. The abstract gives no detail on how the girls were selected, and it does not evaluate any intervention.
Abstract
AbstractWhat does it mean to be a (female) child in the city of Baku, Azerbaijan? How can we critically interpret the girls’ understandings of well-being considering different forms of compliance with unequal social orders? What conclusions may be drawn from understandings of well- being about the nature of welfare state structures and there-in children’s specific positioning? To answer this question, we conducted qualitative interviews with 13 girls during their various leisure activities. The study shows that parents and in particular mothers are children’s key reference persons, while there are hardly any spaces the girls can explore or reference persons outside their immediate families. The article reconstructs how the 13 girls view the social practices of adults and how they relate these practices to their own perceptions of well-being. We inductively reconstruct different forms of compliance, i.e., the extent to which social practices are consistent with the symbolic representations (norms and values) of a specific social order and specific relations of power and hegemony. The analysis shows how girls make differentiations between adult social practices based on their knowledge orders: some practices they justify through a sort of complicity with adultist structures (competent compliance), others they must accept due to their own vulnerabilities as children (compliance and constitutive vulnerability), still others irritate, are rejected, or sabotaged (fragile compliance).