I am thrilled that Daniela's and my chapter proposal to the Routledge International Handbook of Young Children's Rights has been accepted!
In this chapter two contrasting ways of researching with children and their philosophical underpinnings guiding the research process will be discussed. Although at first sight they seem to view participatory research from different perspectives, ethically they share common core principles.
In the first study involving settings in Finland and England, the research involved two-year-olds and a child perspective approach was adopted(Sommer et al., 2009) employing a method in line with Sumsion and Goodfellow’s notion of “looking and listening-in(2012), whereas in the Chilean study, five to seven-year-old children transitioning from kindergarten to first grade, participated in the research and children’s perspectives(Sommer et al., 2009) were sought, employing methods from the Mosaic approach (Clark and Moss, 2005; 2011). The different age groups necessitated different methodologies; however, the ethical issues the researchers needed to grapple with during the research process were similar.
Both researchers started from the assumption that research with children is an ethical endeavour broader than the common principles as set out by university ethics committees or national and international research associations (BERA, 2011; PAHO and WHO, 2009). The starting point for both studies was a rights based ethical framework, one of three main ethical approaches to research with children: duties, rights, or harm/benefit approach (Alderson, 1995). As such, both researchers acknowledge children as subjects of equal worth to adults and worthy of respect. Great emphasis was placed on the researcher’s ethical responsibility towards their young participants and the research process (Birch and Miller, 2002, p.102) rather than trying to promote one right way of involving children in research.
Two main aspects of the child-researcher relationship will be discussed in greater detail; the role the researcher can adopt along a spectrum from either a non-participant observer, to a “lesser adult” (Mandell, 1991; Warming, 2005), and secondly, power as relational and nested (Gallagher, 2008a; 2008b) rather than something that is possessed (Holland et al., 2010).
The chapter will through vignettes explore ethical issues that arose during the various stages of the research process in the different countries and elucidate how a rights-based perspective and a focus on ethical relationships in line with Christensen and Prout’s notion of ethical symmetry (2002) and equality,informed decisions made, to minimise the power imbalance between the child participants and the researcher.
The purpose of this chapter is the bridging of theory and practice by illustrating how grounding research in rights-based ethical relationships, and the phenomenological touch of a “lifeworld” (Lebeswelt) or “life conditions” (Lebenslage) perspective (Kraus, 2015), can put children’s best interest (Article 3) at the core of the research process.