Towards Cultural Relativism and Interdisciplinarity in Researching Giftedness

Abstract

The research reported in this book was small in scale but relatively rich in depth, attempting to capture constructions of giftedness as told in the narratives of four families. This meant that the evidence we collected looks very different from that conventionally reported in research into giftedness, because its methodological orientation was inter-disciplinary, drawing on ideas and approaches in sociology, social history, anthropology and biographical/narrative analysis, rather than psychology. As we argued in the previous chapter, this led us to problematize a number of areas in theory and policy on giftedness, primarily because we were studying giftedness in families of working class origins.