It is recognised by researchers that children’s voices must be included in shaping knowledge and understanding of social life. However, a consistent barrier to co-produced or participatory research is ethical decision making, impacting the type and nature of research that is granted approval. If we are to respond to the UNs Sustainable Development Goals, which demands a unity of purpose, children’s voices must be enabled and ensuring effective ethical frameworks to enable research with children is critical.
Advances have been made to the role children play in research. However, there is a tension between the creativity that informs efforts to allow children to participate and rigid and limiting models and frameworks for ethical oversight. This edited collection takes on an underrepresented topic by investigating the ethical considerations that impact on what research is or is not approved, through chapters that look at competence, consent, methodologies, safeguarding, assessment, and meaningful participation. Exploring the extent to which ‘ethical’ decision making has become limited by institutional understandings of children as ‘objects’, or at best ‘subjects’, within a research process, this collection invites us to start to reimagine a process in which child centred practices are at the centre of encouraging a more fluid and relational method of managing risks and vulnerabilities.
The Ethics of Unlocking Research with Children seeks to understand the challenges and offers solutions to maximise research opportunities with children.
Exploring how ‘ethical’ decision making has become limited by institutional understandings of children as ‘objects’ or ‘subjects’ within a research process, chapters invite us to reimagine a process in which child centred practices are at the centre of encouraging a more fluid and relational method of managing risks and vulnerabilities.
Chapter
1. An introduction: Our journey to unlock the ethics of research
with children; Sam Frankel
Part I
Section Commentaries
Chapter
2. Promoting ethical research: Identifying the gap in research ethics
application processes; Libby Robinson
Part II
Chapter
3. Whos afraid of research with children? Perspectives and
Reflections; Anne-Marie Smith
Chapter
4. Listening to childrens voices about family life: Ethical dilemmas
in researching their experience of parental separation and divorce; Susan
Kay-Flowers
Chapter
5. Covid-19 and young childrens wellbeing: Creative methodologies
and childrens perspectives; Nicky Hirst
Part III
Chapter
6. School-based research with youth: When protection leads to
disconnection; Jennifer Silcox, Laura Rosen, and Tara Bruno
Chapter
7. Empowering children: Ethical decision making in research through a
strength-based approach; Michelle Dwerryhouse and Lauren Hall
Chapter
8. This is a healthy relationship school pupils as researchers and
equals; Janette Porter
Part IV
Chapter
9. Childcare ethics: Is ethics a childcaring one?; Judith Enriquez
Chapter
10. Story creators, being human and minimal risk: A collaborative
inclusion project for university students and pupils in the Liverpool City
Region (LCR) with Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND); Nicky
Hirst and Ceri Daniels
Chapter
11. The ethical dilemma of supporting children impacted by parental
imprisonment, an adverse childhood experience, to have their views heard in
spaces where their voices, faces and /or names might also be seen and heard;
Lorna Brookes
Chapter
12. A closing thought and next steps; Susan Kay-Flowers
Sam Frankel is Founder and Chief Executive of Learning Allowed, with roles as Associate Professor at Kings University College, Canada, Visiting Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK and Adjunct Professor at Western University, Canada. Sam is Series Editor for Emerald Studies in Child Centred Practice.
Susan Kay-Flowers is Senior Lecturer in Education and Early Childhood Studies at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. Sues research interests are participatory research with children and young people, particularly giving 'voice' to childrens experiences.
