Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how children have been involved in research activities in recent international child protection research and what kinds of ethical and methodological decisions are made by researchers regarding children’s participation.
Design/methodology/approach
In the paper, the complexity of children’s participation in research activities is analysed through an integrative literature review.
Findings
Children’s right to self-determination and the right to make informed decisions were the most challenging ethical principles to implement in practice. The study shows that researchers usually decide on the research design, and child welfare professionals and parents assess the eligibility of the children as research subjects.
Originality/value
More ethical reflection and critical discussion on the rights that adults, both parents and professionals, have in deciding the involvement of children in research activities is required.
This paper applies aspects of Bourdieu's conceptual toolkit related to capital, and analyses inter-and intra-generational relations of influence. Applying Bourdieu's concepts to examples of case studies from a children's parliament in Finland, and with reference to an adult resident forum, moments of continuity and disruption in the relatively stable patterns of distinction between children and adults emerge. Children in school councils (at times) are labourers for agendas set by teachers, but the children at the top of the structure's hierarchy can benefit from cultural capital and a functional capital that enables them to set agendas and direct the work of others. The political capital of the person presenting views from the participation sphere and the dominant symbolic capital of market logics appear to have a greater impact than generation on the influence participants achieve. Unquestioned acceptance of this differentiation suggests that new approaches to invited participation structures are needed.
This article discusses the potential of multidisciplinary peer-mentoring groups to facilitate individual and institutional change. To do this, we view peer mentoring as a form of critical education praxis (Mahon et al. 2019), the purpose of which is to create a space for reflexive thinking and asking critical questions. The data were collected by interviewing all thirteen participants – doctoral students and more established scholars – of a multidisciplinary peer-mentoring pilot project. The results show a variety of both individual changes and desired changes within the university, which were brought into view as a result of the sharing of experiences, views and ideas in an open, confidential, multidisciplinary space. Based on these results, we argue that multidisciplinary peer mentoring has a high potential to offer an excellent space for collaborative, critical dialogue, which could ultimately facilitate change among individual academics, but also potentially more widely within higher education institutions.
In research with children, particularly those in contact with social and health services, researchers face ethical challenges and have stringent ethical obligations. One obligation regards the need for researchers to adopt a reflexive approach to considering how children's perspectives and experiences are represented. In this paper, the nature of child-researcher relationships and researchers' positions are examined to further understanding of how to account for the impact of contexts on meaning making in research with children. An integrative literature review of articles concerned with child protection identified a paucity of researcher accounts of reflexivity. The review articles containing reflections on the role of social positions and relationship are analysed using Pierre Bourdieu's notions of epistemic reflexivity. Bourdieu conceives of research relationships as social relationships, where the personal history of the researched and researcher and their social positions affect research processes. Integration of Bourdieu's theory with the strategies described in the identified articles provides a provisional four-dimensional approach to reflexivity, that researchers could usefully apply in future research. Further reflexivity in social-work research with children is called for, so that understanding of the possible dimensions of reflexivity are extended.
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