Researching Young People's Lives provides an overview of some of the key methodological challenges facing youth researchers and an introduction to the broad repertoire of methods used in youth-orientated research.
Gaining informed consent from research participants is widely regarded as central to ethical research practice. This article reports on research which sought to identify contemporary practice in this area amongst researchers working in fields where research participants are often constructed as vulnerable within the research process, and where their potential involvement tends to be mediated by institutional gatekeepers. Drawing on telephone interview and focus group data, the article focuses specifically on the experiences of researchers working with children and young people. It highlights the tensions experienced by many researchers between a personal commitment to an ethical framework which seeks to prioritise the agency and competency of children and young people, and the conditions imposed upon them by working within institutional settings where these principles may be undermined. This research suggests that the consent practices of child-and youth-orientated institutions, however much frowned upon, tend to go largely unchallenged by researchers, to the detriment of the rights of children and young people to opt in and out of research on their own behalf.
Young adults in the UK are increasingly dependent on family support to offset the costs of living independently. This article explores these complex intergenerational exchanges from the perspective of a group of single young adults in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties who had been in receipt of various forms of financial and material support from family members since leaving the parental home. We outline the nature of this support and then consider how these forms of assistance are understood by those in receipt of them. We conclude that the co-existence of a sense of both gratitude and discomfort which is often generated by these exchanges is managed but by no means resolved by a blurring of the boundaries between gifts and loans, a set of negotiations which may not even be an option amongst less advantaged young adults.
Defining network boundaries is a key challenge in social network analysis. In our recent qualitative study of network influences on educational decision-making — based on interviews with 107 individuals from 16 case study networks — the set of members with whom interviews were secured in each case represented only a sub-set of the broader networks from which they were drawn. Following an introduction to our study and an outline of our approach, we consider some of the processes of filtering and selection that affected the specific composition of our network sample, and reflect upon what this tells us about the processes by which participants in network-based research make decisions about the representation of their networks within research contexts. We then explore the question of whether the partiality of our data actually matters, and conclude that it reflects the permeable, partial and dynamic nature of social networks, characteristics which are central to qualitatively-informed understandings of SNA.
Gaining informed consent from people being researched is central to ethical research practice. There are, however, several factors that make the issue of informed consent problematic, especially in research involving members of groups that are commonly characterised as ‘vulnerable’ such as children and people with learning disabilities. This paper reports on a project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) which was concerned to identify and disseminate best practice in relation to informed consent in research with six such groups. The context for the study is the increased attention that is being paid to the issue of informed consent in research, not least because of the broad changes taking place in research governance and regulation in the UK. The project involved the analysis of researchers’ views and experiences of informed consent. The paper focuses on two particular difficulties inherent in the processes of gaining and maintaining informed consent. The first of these is that there is no consensus amongst researchers concerning what comprises ‘informed consent’. The second is that there is no consensus about whether the same sets of principles and procedures are equally applicable to research among different groups and to research conducted within different methodological frameworks. In exploring both these difficulties we draw on our findings to highlight the nature of these issues and some of our participants’ responses to them. These issues have relevance to wider debates about the role of guidelines and regulation for ethical practice. We found that study participants were generally less in favour of guidelines that regulate the way research is conducted and more in favour of guidelines that help researchers to strike balances between the conflicting pressures that inevitably occur in research.
There is widespread debate about ethical practice in social research with most social researchers arguing that situational relativist approaches are appropriate for resolving the ethical issues that emerge. In this article, we draw on research conducted on an ESRC-funded study of informed consent in social research to explore the ethical issues that are raised when conducting research with one’s peers. The study involved conducting focus groups and telephone interviews with academic and non-academic researchers. The ethical issues emerging from the study related to consent, data ownership and the management of confidentiality and anonymity. Participants’ responses to these issues and the ways that we managed them are discussed. We conclude by exploring the implications of this study for research more generally and argue that the increased regulation of research needs to enable researchers to attend reflexively to the social context in which consent takes place.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.