The Sleeping Lives of Children and Teenagers: Night-Worlds and Arenas of Action

Most research into sleep, even that which includes a sociological dimension,tends to focus on sleep outcomes, in effect following an agenda set by thenatural sciences and psychology. The work reported in this paper engages withthe material and social dimensions of sleep from within social constructionistand interactionist frameworks, seeking to explore and theorise the meaning andexperience of sleep from the perspective of the sleeper. In doing this, weexamine how contemporary constructions of sleep and constructions of childhoodand adolescence arise and are linked in the UK context. Sleep time tends to beconstructed as empty of activity other than sleeping and devoid of the sorts ofinteractions that characterise wakeful day-time. However, a grounded analysis ofqualitative data generated with 9 children and 20 teenagers suggested that theassumption of absence of activity and interaction was misleading: their nightswere populated by a range of actors, presences and activities. Placing our focuson these aspects of our participants’ accounts of their sleep we found that thetemporal, spatial and interactional dimensions of routine sleep served to createa definable arena of action (Hutchby and Moran-Ellis 1998) which was marked outboth materially and socially. We conceptually frame this arena of sleep as anight-world (Moran-Ellis, 2006).