Ethical and Inclusive Research with Children

Roseanna Bourke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367587178
• eBook ISBN: 9780429817694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The imperative to include children and young people in educational research, and in more participative ways, is educationally important when exploring policy and practice contexts. It is also critical to recognise that children have the right to contribute to debates, and can express their views through educational research, on matters that affect them. However, the freedom to research alongside young people is only afforded if we continue to unmask the illusion that well-intentioned research is always ethical. This book presents an international set of storied experiences, where researchers have been challenged and have changed the way they think, incorporating and exploring ethics in research. The contributors highlight the ethical dilemmas that can arise when children and young people are included in research agendas, and their reflexive approaches to these dilemmas include being responsive to the cultural, political and social contexts of the lives of the children and developing child-friendly research approaches to ensure their 'voice' is accessed in multiple ways.

These solution-focused and local approaches facilitate a more ethical, deliberative process where the establishment of trust is central to an ethical engagement with young people and their families and where the explication of ethical dilemmas can improve research practice. This book is a critical resource for researchers and practitioners researching with and alongside children and young people.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Inclusive Education.

Accountability through access, authenticity and advocacy when researching with young children

Bronwen Cowie and Elaine Khoo

ABSTRACT

Research with children involving their use of digital and mobile technologies either as a methodological tool or in relation to their learning foregrounds emerging ethical issues and practices. This paper explores some of the ethical and practical challenges we faced in studies involving the recruitment of young children as research participants, and where the integrity of these research collaborations was critical. We propose an ethical framework to foreground these challenges that is shaped by a view of children as social actors and experts on their own lives, information and communication technologies as ubiquitous in children’s lives, and ethics as a situated and multifaceted responsibility. This framework has three aspects: access, authenticity and advocacy. We draw on examples from different research projects and use ethically important moments to illustrate how notions of access, authenticity and advocacy can foreground the ethical challenges in teaching–learning research contexts to better consider and offer children greater agency in research collaborations.

Introduction

Children and young people have a point of view and it is important to allow them the opportunity to express this (UNCRC 1989; Article 12), especially in research that aims to understand and enrich their lives. When children do not have an opportunity to express their views about educational matters they experience a ‘double denial’ (Lundy 2007, 935) – a loss of opportunity to express their views and a loss of opportunity to participate in development, reform and innovation. Research with children involving the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is opening up new possibilities for their participation. These possibilities have newly exposed and reconfigured longstanding ethical concerns: they have raised issues that permeate ‘every aspect of the research process from conception and design through the research practice, and continues to require consideration during dissemination of the results’ (Goodwin et al. 2003, 567; see also Lundy, McEvoy, and Byrne 2011).

A number of ethical codes of practice, guidelines and frameworks for working and researching with children already exist (American Educational Research Association 2011; ESRC 2015; Morrow 2005). These tend to include notions of the need to generate worthwhile knowledge, informed consent, do no harm, and social justice. This paper sets out a framework of three ethical concerns that emerged for us in relation to our attempts to be accountable to the children we research with. For the purposes of prompting debate we conceptualise these concerns as to do with: access, authenticity and advocacy. Our framing of concerns as access, authenticity and advocacy is informed by our commitment to viewing children as social actors, our understanding of the possibilities and challenges the use of ICTs involves, and our view of ethics as a multifaceted responsibility. While these concerns are not necessarily unique to researching with children, they are refracted in particular ways within research with children because of the way that adults mediate access to children; the nature of the environments in which researchers encounter children; the unequal power relationships between adults and children; and the communication capabilities and repertoires of children. In this paper, we discuss and illustrate these concerns using ethically important moments (Guillemin and Gillam 2004, 261) distilled from a number of our research projects.

Explicating a research orientation

Our orientation to working with children is that children are social actors and experts in their own lives. We recognise the important role ICTs play in children’s lives and understand ethics as a situated and multifaceted responsibility. These ideas underpin and are fundamental to our ethical framework.

Children as social actors and experts on their own lives

Sociologists of childhood view children as competent participants in their social worlds rather than people who are merely developing towards adulthood (James and Prout 1997). Seen from this perspective children, through their talk and interactions, participate actively in the construction of their own social situations and they are experts on their own lives. The notion that children are competent practitioners of their social worlds flows into research programmes based on very different assumptions, relationships and ethical considerations than those that take a developmental approach (Danby and Farrell 2004). First and foremost, researchers, both ethically and practically, have a responsibility to take into account children’s views at all stages of the research process (Christensen and James 2000). No longer can children be viewed as passive objects of research, rather they need to be understood as research participants whose perspectives are important in their own right and whose accounts are competent portrayals of their experiences (Qvortrup et al. 1994). This reconfigures the power balance between the researcher/research participant because both groups are recognised as active and intentional; researchers are held to account and need to be cognisant even critical of their own practice to ensure children’s active participation and empowerment within the research process.

ICTs as part of children’s lives

The increasing proliferation and pervasive use of ICTs in all aspects of life means that most children have had some digitally mediated learning and recreational experiences. Views of young children as active, competent and able learners/explorers of their environment (James and Prout 1997) are sympathetic to children as active users of ICTs in their various forms. Researchers have acknowledged the increasingly important role ICTs and digital technologies play in young children’s lives in both home and school/centre settings (Archard and Archard 2012). Arguments about benefits and concerns associated with children’s safe and appropriate use of technologies for learning (Zevenbergen 2007) can also be applied to the research process. Digital technologies, including multimedia enabled networked digital devices (e.g. digital cameras, mobile devices and web-based tools), and the visual methodologies they support are far from being ethically neutral (Flewitt 2006). Although they have made it easier to record image and audio data and to facilitate dissemination of findings to participants, parents/caregivers, wider stakeholders and other researchers (e.g. through electronic portfolios, interactive websites, blogs, other social media and so forth), ethical issues arise through these developments. The ubiquity of digital technologies has created – and to some extent exacerbated – the range of social and ethical issues that researchers face and are exploring in domains such as identity, social interaction and privacy. For example, researchers need to consider carefully how to video record participants in ways that do not distract and/or disempower them while preserving the integrity of the research. They need to consider the impact of bringing a digital recording device into the learning environment and, issues such as anonymity and confidentiality and the ownership of data (Derry et al. 2010; Lindgren 2012; Schuck and Kearney 2006).

Ethics as a situated and multifaceted responsibility

We take the position that ethics are ‘situational and responsive’ (Morrow 2008, 56) and recognise that all researchers need to manage their responsibilities to the research community and to their research participants. They also need to manage their responsibility for dissemination of their research as part of ensuring the wider societal value and impact of their work. The research community, a research project’s participants and society at large each impose somewhat different obligations and ethical demands on the researcher and research team (Tangen 2014). When working with children it is more than ever important for researchers to find a balance between these different demands and to think through the implications of the imperative to do no harm. In this case, potential harm can range from avoiding working with a particular child or group of children thereby limiting opportunities to more fully understand their experiences (Grodin and Glantz 1994; Morrow 2005), to generating evidence from a child in a way that undermines them in front of their peers and to misrepresenting the voice of a child in reports (Alderson 1995; Alderson and Morrow 2004). For the purposes of this paper, the multifaceted ethical demands of working with children when they are viewed as social actors who are experts in their own lives are interrogated in terms of access, authenticity and advocacy.

A framework for ethical concerns: access, authenticity and advocacy

In this section, we discuss and illustrate our ethical concerns framework of access, accountability and advocacy using vignettes of ‘ethically important moments’ (Guillemin and Gillam 2004, 261). These are taken from projects where we have worked with children to understand their experiences of learning. To be clear, the concerns, as well as the research orientation from which the concerns emerged, are based on our analysis of data from the following projects. The projects we reference include:

• an investigation into student views of classroom assessment (LISP Assessment) (Cowie 2000);
• two photo-elicitation studies (auto-photography for science and technology [APS&T]) (Moreland and Cowie 2005);
• auto-photography for maths (APM) (Taylor, Cowie, and Moreland 2006);
• an investigation of how very young children use iPads for educational purposes (iPads n kids) (Khoo et al. 2015),
• how ICTs can enhance the teaching and learning in primary science classrooms (SCIAnTICT) (Otrel-Cass, Cowie, and Khoo 2011); and
• culturally responsive pedagogy in primary science classrooms (CRP&A) (Cowie et al. 2011).

Across these projects, participant children ages ranged from three and a half to 14 years. In some of these projects ICTs have been used for data generation and/or analysis; in others they have been a main focus for teaching and learning. In what follows vignettes are provided here as representative illustrations of the concerns we have identified. We also highlight aspects that we think are in need of further investigation.

Access as concern in being accountable

For this paper, we take ‘access’ to encompass the need to make contact and establish relationships with children and their caregivers (parents, teachers and or principals in loco parentis) and the need to consider informed consent as an ongoing process. A sociological orientation to children recognises that a range of social and cultural norms regulate children’s ability to make choices (Christensen and O’Brien 2003). Within research the process of gaining children’s informed consent is very often complicated by the challenge of gaining access to talk to children independently. Parents, guardians, teachers and social workers can act as ‘gatekeepers’ who limit and/or mediate researchers’ access based on their understanding of what is in the best interests of the child and/or his or her potential vulnerability (Morrow 2005). Parents can also be nervous about their children talking independently to a researcher (Hood, Kelly, and Mayall 1996). Access to children in educational settings often involves a chain of negotiation that includes the centre headteacher, the school principal, teachers and even institutional receptionists and administrators. While institutional structures can filter out inappropriate requests, these adults can block researcher access to children due to their own agendas or they can exert pressure for participation. Sometimes centres and schools assume that the principal or teachers can speak for children, and neither children nor their parents need to be consulted. These actions can hinder researcher attempts to gain authentic informed consent from children.

Tymchuk (1992) makes a distinction between assent and consent that is helpful in understanding the challenge of gaining informed consent with children. He describes assent as a parent or guardian agreeing to allow a child to participate in a research project and consent as the child agreeing to participate. In our research our understanding of children as active participants and competent interpreters of their own worlds has translated to our striving through making repeated efforts to ensure children understand the research aims and processes and are in, as much as is possible, a position to give informed consent or dissent. We use a combination of strategies, working in collaboration with teachers and parents, to ensure children’s overall awareness about the research as highlighted by the ESRC guideline:

Guidance regarding children’s participation in research emphasises the need to support children’s understanding of the research process by tailoring methods and information appropriately. (Wiles et al. 2010)

The following two vignettes exemplify how we went about this.

Vignette 1: multiple ways of gaining access and forming relationships

In our work with very young children in a crèche setting, we collaborated with the crèche teachers and supervisor to ensure parents were aware of and understood the research aim which was to understand children’s use of iPads (iPads n kids; Khoo et al. 2015). This was accomplished through a number of strategies including: a general newsletter about the project that was sent home with each child, a website about the project that introduced the research team and aims of the research, and a visual message on the main noticeboard in the crèche which functioned to inform parents about developments and events of the day. Information letters were sent home with each child and the teachers talked to the parents about the research when they dropped off or picked up their child. More importantly, the teachers explained the research to the children; what and who it would involve and how it might impact on their daily activities in crèche. We explicitly asked parents to talk about the research with their child in our information letters and co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The ethics of including and ‘standing up’ for children and young people in educational research
• 1 Accountability through access, authenticity and advocacy when researching with young children
• 2 Ethical dilemmas of youth participatory action research in a democratic setting
• 3 A sociocultural analysis of the ethics of involving children in educational research
• 4 Listening ethically to indigenous children: experiences from India
• 5 Towards an ethic of cultural responsiveness in researching Māori and Tongan children’s learning in everyday settings
• 6 Using interactive nonfiction narrative to enhance competence in the informed consent process with 3-year-old children
• 7 Exploring the ethical issues related to visual methodology when including young children’s voice in wider research samples
• 8 Ethical issues in listening to young children in visual participatory research
• Index