From December 2019 to February 2020, we conducted a research commissioned by the Government Office and the Ministry of Social Affairs of Estonia to map the challenges and experiences of children’s accessibility. Research findings provided firstly input to the work of Estonian government’s task force for accessibility, but more broadly they also benefit for various aspects of society: planning public transport network or road infrastructure, providing goods and services, operating schools etc.
About 60 children aged 7-14 from Tallinn, Märjamaa, Viljandi and Kohtla-Järve participated in the research. Among them were children with both Estonian and Russian home language. The main focus was on physical barriers, but children were also eager to share their experiences about social, psychological, behavioral barriers as well.
In addition to group interviews, we used walk-along-interviews, which means that the anthropologist walks with the child on his/her daily journey between home, school and after-school activities. Inspired by classical anthropological participatory observation, in a walk-along-interview children themselves could be guides and introducers of their daily life and activities. Among other things, the method makes it possible to provide answers to questions that a person cannot answer verbally, because he or she may not be even aware of it. This is especially visible when studying children’s experiences, as children are not yet used to analyzing and discussing their everyday activities in a more abstract way. We recorded the walk-along-interviews with photo and video equipment, gathering this way information about the physical obstacles and the behavioral aspects of the target group, which formed the backbone of the research.
