Advocating for a More Relational and Dynamic Model of Participation for Child Researchers

Abstract

Primary school children participating as researchers has become a moral obligation to meet the goal of children's participation rights. Yet, critical voices rarely question the ethical and practical implications of turning young children into mini-clones of adult researchers. While enabling and constraining aspects of participatory methods and inherent power issues per se are widely discussed, adult researchers still seem to struggle to critically engage with celebratory accounts of children as researchers. In particular, the practical obligations, ethical challenges and tensions that impact on primary school children's research experiences, are underexplored. Findings from two projects on play, which engaged children as active researchers, suggest that more attention needs to be paid to the messy realities of becoming and being a child researcher. In particular, researchers should be more attuned to children's capabilities and the ethical hurdles for child and adult researchers. This article argues therefore for a more dynamic, meaningful and realistic model of participation, that speaks to the messy realities of becoming and being a child-researcher. In other words, the article questions the dominant orthodoxy of children as researchers as the 'gold standard' of participatory research with children.

Adopting a participatory methodology and post‐structural epistemology: Reflections on a research project with young people

“…As noted by Gallagher (), no instance of children's participation will be quite the same as another. Findings from this project support the views of Ergler (, p. 247) that there are problematic issues in pushing for a “gold standard” in participatory research with children. So too, no matter how well‐intentioned is the researcher, power cannot be simply “gifted” to children (Gallagher, ).…”

“…Traditionally, research participants take a passive role, undertaking tasks preset by the researcher (Ergler, ). Together with an intersecting position of “child,” children, and young people are therefore often excluded from research or included in problematic ways.…”

Conceptualizing Youth Participation in Children’s Health Research: Insights from a Youth-Driven Process for Developing a Youth Advisory Council

“…Although such reciprocal adult–youth partnerships in research are often idealized [8,9], it is often not achieved in practice; adults attempt to integrate youth into the research process without critically considering how this youth–adult dynamic will function, resulting in limited decision-making and participation on the part of children and young adults [1,21]. However, by denying young people opportunities to participate properly in decision-making processes related to their quality of life and the social and physical wellbeing of their communities, important prospects are missed for mobilizing inclusive and collective action on social, community, and environmental change [29].…”

“…Given the inherent power asymmetries between adults and young people, youth involvement in academic research is often at risk of tokenism, as per Arnstein’s Ladder of Participation [1,2,3]. While many disciplines have seen an epistemological shift from conducting research on youth to conducting research with and for youth, engaging children and teens in research remains fraught with conceptual, methodological, and practical challenges [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. In this paper, we present a new rendering of Arnstein’s Ladder, which originally was established to encourage an enlightened dialogue on citizenship participation and to discuss the extent of citizens’ decision making power, derived from our critical reflections on our youth-driven development process for creating a Youth Advisory Council (YAC) for the Human Environments Analysis Laboratory (HEAL).…”

Introduction to the Issue: “Promoting Children’s Participation in Research, Policy and Practice”

“…But not all children and young people may be able to or even want to participate in research at this level-ascertaining their views and wishes is vital in any research involving children, including in PR. As Ergler (2017) demonstrates in her examination of children's roles as co-researchers in New Zealand, these roles are often idealized and overlook the 'messy realities' of becoming and being a child researcher (p. 1). Furthermore, what do the relationships between participants-as-researchers and academic researchers look like?…”