Interviewing Children and Young People for Research

Nisha Dogra, Author, Michelle O′Reilly

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781473914537, 9781473914520
• eBook ISBN: 9781473994409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a practical, pedagogical perspective on conducting qualitative interviews with children and young people.
From designing and choosing the type of interview through to planning, structuring, conducting, and analysing them this book is a complete toolkit. Drawing upon real-world examples and researchers? anecdotes, the authors combine both theoretical background and practical advice to introduce common issues and procedures and to help you undertake your own interviews in the field.

Key topics include how to:

• Choose which interview style meets your and your participants' needs
• Maintain a safe and ethically sound research environment
• Incorporate participatory methods into formal interview settings
• Encourage participation and capture the voice of interviewees
• Utilise digital tools, software and methods to collect and analyse data

This clear, articulate book is an essential companion for anyone interviewing children and young people.

1 The Importance of Interviewing Children for Research

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the chapter the reader should be able to:

• Define what constitutes an interview.
• Assess the difference between interviewing adults and interviewing children.
• Describe the rights of children to participate in research.
• Evaluate the necessity for child-centred approaches.
• Recognise why research with children was historically avoided.
• Critically assess the benefits of using interviews with children and young people as a research method.

Introduction

Involving children in research is a fairly modern endeavour and more recently children’s rights to participate in research have been increasingly recognised. This has led to a greater encouragement to include children’s voices through research. However, researchers who are new to doing research with children may find it quite daunting, especially if undertaking qualitative research interviews without much experience of either conducting interviews or of doing research with children. Undertaking research interviews with children and young people can be challenging for several reasons, including varying chronological ages, developmental abilities and expectations of the research. This introductory chapter outlines various issues, many of which are explored in greater depth later in the book. This chapter introduces you to the reasons why interviewing children is so important and we benchmark this against the issues of the child’s position in society, child-centred practices and children’s rights. We introduce you to the notion of child-centred research and the significance of this for interview research. We contextualise this against a discussion of the position of children in society and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. We conclude the chapter by providing the benefits and limitations of interviewing children and young people to demonstrate the usefulness of the method.

Defining An Interview

Intuitively most people have some sense of what an interview is like and some of you may have been interviewed in some context, such as for a job or market research. An interview is considered to be a conversation between two or more people, where one party (the interviewer) asks particular questions to elicit responses from the other (the interviewee). There are many different types of interview – consider some examples listed below:

• Job or careers interview
• News interview
• Market research interview
• Health interview
• Psychiatric or clinical diagnostic interview
• Police interrogation interview
• Chat show interview
• Qualitative or quantitative research interview.

Clearly the type of interview we are focusing on in this book is the research interview, with a key focus on interviewing children. However, reflecting on your general knowledge about how interviews work is a useful starting point for any research project. In the research context an interview will be more personal than a questionnaire as the interviewer always works directly with the interviewee and has the opportunity to ask further questions based on the responses given. The common framework for interviewing of any kind is that the interviewer sets an agenda and asks questions, and consenting interviewees provide responses, although the balance of this may be dependent on context and purpose. We provide an example below from our own interview study with children to illustrate what this looks like (see Box 1.1).

Box 1.1 Example of research interview

This example is taken from a study with children aged 8–10 years old who had both mental health and educational needs.

Interviewer: Okay. And how were you feeling when you were at school?

Child: Um, okay but upset.

Interviewer: Mmm. Okay, and did you speak to anybody until the day, before the day when you got really upset?

Child: I tried telling mum but mum but I – Mum said something before that she thought it was, um, oh what’s it called? Umm [Pause] trying to be noticed.

It is clear from this example that the interview follows a traditional format whereby the interviewer asks the child a question, and the child provides an answer. Notice that the interviewer then follows up the child’s answer by latching the next question to the response previously given by the child.

Interviewing Adults And Interviewing Children

Historically, interviewing children and their families was mostly avoided as there was a general belief that children and young people did not have the social competence to recall credible accounts of their experiences (Fraser et al., 2014). Furthermore, because of the potential complexity of interviewing younger participants some researchers felt uncomfortable as they lacked the necessary skills to engage children and young people in an interview. Over the last few decades however, there has been a growing interest in treating children as a distinctive population that warrants some inquiry in their own right. Initially, child research focused on children’s development and their abilities, but this gradually received criticisms for treating children as objects to study.

Contemporary research has an emphasis on doing research with children, treating them as agentive subjects in the process and this perspective has led to interviews with children and young people becoming more commonplace (O’Reilly et al., 2013a). This is in part due to changing attitudes regarding children and childhood, and a greater emphasis being placed on child-centred attitudes and children’s rights. The objective of this type of research is to include children’s voices in decisions that impact on them and their environment.

Children’s Rights

Respecting children’s rights is a fundamental attitude in most modern societies. There is now a greater emphasis on recognising children as active participants in their own decision making and this is reflected in a recent report by National Voices (2015). Notably, this new discourse of children’s rights is juxtaposed against a pre-existing culture of paternalism towards children that still infiltrates all levels of society and causes tensions between realising children’s rights in practice and protecting them from harm. Consequently, the debates around children’s rights and voices in practice is nuanced, and also contested in typically subtle ways.

The conceptualisation of children’s rights was first recognised internationally by the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1924) when it was adopted by the League of Nations. In 1989, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted and has since been ratified by 195 countries (UN, 1989). The Convention has 54 articles that cover all aspects of a child’s life and set out the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights that all children everywhere are entitled to. It also explains how adults and governments must work together to make sure all children can enjoy all their rights. In 1989, all governments across the world but two promised all children the same rights by adopting the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (aka the CRC or UNCRC). The Convention changed the way children are viewed and treated – in other words, as human beings with a distinct set of rights instead of as passive objects of care and charity.

Four of the 54 articles are known as overarching general principles. These are:

• Non-discrimination (Article 2): The Convention applies to all children whatever their ethnicity, gender, religion, language, abilities, whatever they think or say, no matter what type of family they come from, whatever their circumstances.
• Best interest of the child (Article 3): A child’s best interests must be a top priority in all decisions and actions that affect children. All adults should do what is best for children and should think about how their decisions will affect children. Determining what is in children’s best interests should take into account children’s own views and feelings.
• Right to life, survival and development (Article 6): Children have the right to life and governments must do all they can to ensure children survive and develop to their fullest potential. The right to life and survival guarantees the most basic needs such as nutrition, shelter or access to healthcare. Development – physical, emotional, educational, social and spiritual – is the goal of many of the rights in the Convention.
• Right to be heard (Article 12): Every child has the right to express their views, feelings and wishes in all matters affecting them, and to have their views considered and taken seriously. This principle recognises children as actors in their own lives and applies at all times, throughout childhood.

For example… A child in care has the same right to an education as a child who lives with his/her parents.

For example… Children in hospital may need lifesaving treatment, and they should be consulted about the process of the treatment.

For example… The right to education, access to information, freedom of thought or right to play.

For example… In the research context all children have a right to participate in research and express their views of a subject matter if they choose to. This is regardless of their abilities, age, social circumstances, race, gender, etc.

Important point: It is important that you respect the rights of the children to participate in your research project and allow them to participate on their terms.

An important article in this convention for researchers was Article 12, which proposed that children and young people have the right to be engaged in decision making and should have their views respected, and Article 13 which stated that children have the right to freedom of expression.

Before you go any further with the chapter we suggest that you try the activity in Box 1.2 so that you can reflect on the nature of children’s rights.

Box 1.2 Activity on children’s rights

Aside from the four overarching rights we have discussed, what civil, political, cultural, social and economic rights do you think children should have in research? What might the challenges be of ensuring those rights are realised in practice in an interview-based study with children? You may find looking at the UNCRC on the UNICEF website helpful in developing your answers: http://www.unicef.org.uk/Documents/Publicationpdfs/UNCRC_PRESS200910web.pdf.

It is challenging to consider the exact nature of the rights children hold in research as the researcher has to balance including them in the interview and allowing them some agency in directing the trajectory of the interview, against protecting them from possible psychological or physical harm and promoting their best interests. Historically some groups of more vulnerable children have been excluded from research as it was deemed necessary to protect them, but by taking such a position this has excluded their voices and removed participation rights from them. Some examples of groups considered most vulnerab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1 The Importance of Interviewing Children for Research
• 2 Designing your Interview Study
• 3 Different Types of Interview
• 4 Different Ways of Conducting Interviews: Face-to-Face, Telephone and Online
• 5 Planning your Interview: Key Decisions and Practical Issues
• 6 The Use of Participatory Methods
• 7 The Structure and Form of an Interview: Theoretical Background
• 8 Ethical Issues with Respect to Interviewing
• 9 The Interview Encounter –Child and Researcher Factors that Warrant Consideration and their Interaction
• 10 Analysing Children’s Interviews
• 11 Reflecting And Attending To The Process
• Answers To Vignettes
• References
• Index