This methods paper addresses a simple, yet curiously understudied question: When do we first acquire the ability to view specific persons, properties and practices as ‘similar’ or ‘different’, ‘equal’ or ‘unequal’ in social status? Despite sociology's theoretical commitment to the importance of ‘primary socialization’, sociological research on the ontogenesis of our ability to situate ourselves and others in social space remains scarce. This paper argues that the reasons for sociology's ‘child neglect’ are not purely conceptual, but also methodological in nature. Conventional sociological methods are in fact not particularly well-geared to dealing with the obstacles that accompany the study of young actors. This paper discusses three of these obstacles – mastery of language, limitations in attention-span and the asymmetry of the researcher/respondent-relationship – and presents a visual method designed to circumvent or minimize their impact. This method centers around a classificatory game that allows children to combine a set of drawings of persons and objects according to different and even opposing principles of classification (i.e. color or social status). Preliminary results produced by this method suggest that an elementary ‘social sense’ already starts to form among preschoolers.

这篇方法论文解决了一个简单但奇怪地未被研究的问题：我们什么时候第一次获得将特定的人、财产和实践视为社会地位“相似”或“不同”、“平等”或“不平等”的能力？尽管社会学在理论上致力于“初级社会化”的重要性，但关于我们将自己和他人置于社会空间中的能力的个体发生的社会学研究仍然很少。本文认为，社会学“忽视儿童”的原因不仅是纯粹的概念性的，而且在本质上也是方法论的。传统的社会学方法实际上并不特别适合处理伴随年轻演员研究的障碍。本文讨论了其中的三个障碍——掌握语言，注意力跨度的限制和研究人员/受访者关系的不对称性——并提出了一种旨在规避或最小化其影响的视觉方法。这种方法以分类游戏为中心，允许儿童根据不同甚至相反的分类原则（即颜色或社会地位）组合一组人物和物体的图画。这种方法产生的初步结果表明，一种基本的“社会意识”已经在学龄前儿童中开始形成。