In keeping with developments in children's rights, research is increasingly including the views of children. Accessing a hard to reach population of children can, however, raise significant ethical and methodological challenges for researchers. Negotiating access through gatekeepers, securing parental consent and limits on confidentiality are central issues in the recruitment process of children. This paper is based on a qualitative study of young carers in the Irish population. It outlines the methodological approaches employed to access a representative sample of young carers and the measures taken to fulfil ethical obligations. In the recruitment phase of the study, researchers attempted to strike a balance between two sometimes competing requirements, the need to protect children from harm and to respect children's competence. This paper reflects on the success and limitations of the approaches adopted towards achieving this balance, exploring the use of gatekeepers as a method to identify and recruit a hidden population, and revisiting the measures taken to comply with the ethical requirements of parental consent and limits on confidentiality.
In Ireland, historically and in the current era, family has been a central concern for society and the State. This article provides a descriptive overview of family life in Ireland and of major family-related changes over the past 40 years. It presents a general framework of analysis within which these changes can be understood, considers the general nature of change and continuity in family in Ireland, and proposes some implications for research and policy in the early part of this century.
Keywords family change, Ireland, alternative families, families in poverty, policyAlthough its exceptionalism is a matter for debate (Seward, Stivers, Igoe, Amin, & Cosimo, 2005), there is no doubt that family 1 in Ireland has had enormous historical significance and that it retains a central position in the major social and policy discourses of the current era. What family is, what family does, and how it does it are ongoing questions for Irish society and its government. It is fair to say that in the first 50 years of the modern Irish State, answers to these questions were provided by a State that took its lead from the Catholic Church. Yet, in spite of a more recent period of autonomy from Articles Canavan
A B S T R AC TThe worldwide growth in formal youth mentoring programmes over the past two decades is partly a response to the perception that young people facing adversity do not have access to supportive relationships with adults and positive role models in their communities to the degree they once had. Formal mentoring programmes facilitate the development of a friendship or 'match' between an older volunteer and a young person, with the objective of supporting the young persons' personal and social development. Drawing on 66 semistructured interviews with young people, parents, mentors and caseworkers associated with nine youth mentoring matches in the Big Brothers Big Sisters Programme in Ireland, this paper analyses the forms of social support evident in the mentor-mentee relationships and highlights how the mentoring relationship was perceived to have impacted on the well-being of the young people participating. The findings reflect the consensus in the mentoring literature that close, well-established mentoring relationships have the potential to bring about meaningful change in the lives of young people.
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