Interviews and Focus Groups With Children:Methods That Match Children's Developing Competencies Although researchers have not always recognized the value of engaging children in qualitative studies, it is now widely accepted that interviews and focus groups with children can provide a rich understanding of family life. As qualitative research with children continues to mount, the literature explicating good practice for conducting interviews and focus groups with children has not kept pace. Differences between children and adults need to be considered throughout the interview process. Researchers need guidance in flexibly adapting their methods to match children's developing cognitive, linguistic, social, and psychological competencies. This article draws on extant literature and lessons learned by a novice qualitative researcher to provide concrete recommendations for conducting interviews and focus groups with school-age children.Qualitative research can play an important role in helping family studies researchers to understand and promote positive development for children and their families. The rich descriptions generated by qualitative research provide a window into family life and the meaning that family members attribute to their experiences.
Mentoring can have a significant positive impact on the lives of individuals. People with disabilities seeking to locate mentors face a variety of potential challenges and benefits. This article addresses mentoring-related issues faced by professionals with disabilities. The article presents a model of mentoring and discusses the difficulties faced by individuals with disabilities in locating mentors. It describes the negative impact of the lack of available mentors upon the educational and vocational development of people with disabilities. It offers effective strategies aimed at enhancing mentoring relationships with people with disabilities, including macrofocused strategies capable of enhancing the effectiveness of disability-related mentoring programs and microfocused strategies useful in developing quality mentoring relationships.
Few studies that engage youth in community-based participatory research (CBPR) focus on issues of safety/violence, include elementary school-aged youth, or quantitatively assess outcomes of the CBPR process. This article expands understanding of CBPR with youth by describing and evaluating the outcomes of a project that engaged fifth-grade students at 3 schools in bullying-focused CBPR. Results suggest that the project was associated with decreases in fear of bullying and increases in peer and teacher intervention to stop bullying. We conclude with implications for the engagement of elementary school-aged youth in CBPR to address bullying and other youth issues.
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