Adult’s Involvement in Children’s Participation: Juggling Children’s Places and Spaces

While children and young people’s participation is a well‐established research field, much less has been written about the roles that adults play in supporting this participation. This article examines the involvement of adults within participatory forums in English schools and local authorities. Drawing on empirical data from research on children’s participation in pupil and civic councils, the article discusses the complex and sometimes contradictory pressures on adults in their advisory roles with young participants. The article goes on to explore these roles within a broader conceptual framework that counterposes children’s ‘places’ with children’s ‘spaces’.     

Children's Intent Participation in a Pediatric Community of Practice

This study analyzes informal learning, drawing on video recordings of staff-child interaction in a pediatric unit. It is shown that even very young patients engage in intent community participation, carefully noting fine variations in examination and treatment practices. They orient to everyday routines in successively more complex ways, gradually acquiring novel repertoires of practices; advancing from nonverbal uptake to an active use of medical terminology, and to actively assisting staff members. Ultimately, the children themselves assume almost full responsibility for routine procedures. The unit had adopted partnership-oriented routines, and the doctors and nurses spent much time in securing the children's consent and participation in their own treatment. In contrast to much earlier work in pediatric settings which has shown children to be marginal participants; even the youngest patients were engaged, and they successively acquired a set of novel practices related to treatment procedures. Together with doctors and nurses, the children could be seen to form a community of practice. But community is not something fixed; instead it is seen as an emergent phenomenon, dependent on staff members' and children's mutual alignments and collaborative action. Learning is thus analyzed as a social and relational phenomenon.     

Older Adolescents’ Understanding of Participant Rights in the BlackBerry Project,a Longitudinal Ambulatory Assessment Study

For a long‐term, longitudinal study that used BlackBerry smartphones for passive ambulatory assessment among older adolescents, this study focused on three areas of ethical concern: (1) adolescents’ competence to give assent; (2) understanding of confidentiality, the protection of information, and project goals; and (3) awareness of procedures and benefits, and comfort with the research design. One hundred and seventy‐eight participants were 17 and 18 years old (84 girls). Results suggested that participants freely gave consent and understood most, but not all of the informed consent information. Participants reported a high level of satisfaction. Participants showed less understanding of when their confidentiality would be broken and how data would be protected.     

Becoming,Being and Having Been: Practitioner Perspectives on Temporal Stances and Participation across Children’s Services

This article is based on a study of the changing meanings and experiences of citizenship and participation for young people in transition from primary to secondary school. One of the primary concerns of the study is to better understand how different professional practices impact upon young people’s uptake of participation and adoption of civic identity. To gain some insight into this area the article first looks at the contexts in which participation work is developing and the interrelationships between these developments across children’s services. How different practitioner’s conceptualise participation is tied into different assessments of young people’s or children’s capacity. Recasting questions of capacity as dialogues across differing temporal stances can offer practitioners new ways to reflect upon the power negotiations within their relations with young people. The key role temporality plays in configuring power relationships and transactions is explored as it arises within practitioner life history interviews. The shifts between temporal stances that young people experience as they interact with different practitioners are illustrated through fieldwork data.     

The Management of Confidentiality and Anonymity in Social Research

This article explores the ways in which social researchers manage issues of confidentiality and the contexts in which deliberate and accidental disclosures occur. The data are drawn from a qualitative study of social researchers’ practices in relation to informed consent. It comprised 31 individual interviews and six focus groups as well as invited email responses with researchers working with vulnerable groups or with an interest in research ethics. Researchers reported feeling compelled to break confidentiality when participants were perceived as being at risk of harm but not in cases of involvement in illegal activity. Situations in which accidental disclosures occurred were also identified. Researchers reported varying ways in which they protected the confidentiality of their participants in the dissemination of their research, including omitting data and changing key characteristics of participants. The implications of researchers’ practices on data integrity and relationships with participants are discussed.     

Young people’s participation in Fiji: understanding conceptualizations and experiences

Young people’s participation has become a cliché in western democracies. In the case of Fiji, it is a novel concept, not because young people have not participated before but because they are exposed to new and different ways of involvement. This paper is one of the earliest attempts to explore young people’s understanding and experiences of participation in Fiji. It is based on data drawn from an exploratory study conducted with a select group of young people in Suva, Fiji. Forms of young people’s engagement although diverse are dominated by the traditional discourse of participation represented in ‘performance and responsibility’ and tend to be represented in the media and policy circles. This paper shows that young people are not bound by these conceptions but talk of participation as experienced in the hybridized settings of their everyday reality. The study offers a window into understanding young people’s participation in Fiji and suggests that a deeper appreciation of this facet of their lives can be achieved with an emphasis on participatory talk with and an exploration of spaces where young people are constantly negotiating the traditional expectations of being young, being dutiful citizens and self-directed individuals.     

Voice,authenticity and ethical challenges: the participatory dissemination of youth-generated visual data over social media

Using the theoretical frameworks of childhood studies and visual ethics, this article explores ethical ways of engaging children and young people in disseminating self-generated visual data (‘participatory dissemination’) over social media. The discussion draws on a research project carried out with a group of young people in an underserved community in South Africa. The project was an educational intervention that aimed to enable the participants to bring out their experiences with the HIV and AIDS pandemic in South Africa and to reflect on related issues through participatory video making. The methodological focus was on exploring visual ethics in the context of participatory dissemination. Despite a growing interest in social media, few studies have been conducted in relation to ethics in using social media as an outlet to disseminate visual data created by young people. This article contributes to addressing this knowledge gap. It is argued that (1) the process of remaking visual data can enhance the ethics of dissemination by offering young participants an opportunity to reflect on self-representation more carefully and (2) the verbal contextualisation of participant-generated visual data can contribute to a further clarification of young people’s ideas, thereby making dissemination more ethical. I am cautious, however, to overstate the significance of disseminating young people’s verbal and visual expressions without researchers’ discretion because such expressions may contribute to stigmatising the young people.     

Research with Children and Young People: The Issue of Parental (Proxy) Consent

This study examines the potential problems with the parental consent requirement, substantiated with examples mainly from healthcare and social research studies. This will illustrate how the parental consent requirement, instead of promoting high ethical standards, may result in some instances of children’s rights and ethical considerations being ignored or receiving cursory attention. The ‘blanket’ requirement of parental consent for all research involving children under the age of 18 years needs to be challenged as it fails to recognise children’s capacities and accord children due respect as persons in their own right. Flexible ethical guidelines should be developed that take cognisance of children’s competence in contemporary society and at the same time protects children from inappropriate research and procedures.     

Autonomy,spontaneity and creativity in research with children. A study of experience and participation,in central Italy and North West England

ABSTRACT

Research involving children, deemed to have difficulties with conventional means of communication, can perpetuate reductive forms of representation of children’s knowledges and experiences. This article focuses on the possibilities and opportunities that visual and creative methods can offer to researching with children. Children advance their views in and through spontaneous and concrete forms of participation. Autonomy in aesthetic acts is central to this methodology; to explore practices that produce and reproduce presuppositions deriving from societal attitudes affecting research with children, their agency and self-presentation. This cross-cultural study was conducted in Central Italy and North West England: children contributed their perspectives and experiences through participation in a series of creative encounters resulting in aesthetic and embodied outcomes of sociological and educational significance. The study contributes to the debate on children’s autonomy and the value and quality of participation through artistic practice. Examples from the corpus of data, which includes a series of artefacts and over 900 photographs from each geo-cultural context, are presented. The study shows that it is possible to harmonise power imbalances in spaces of creative freedom, in research and education, where children’s choices and agency are respected.     

Self-work and social change: disindividualised participation amongst young Australian Buddhist practitioners

Recent work on youth participation has mobilised a ‘DIY’ or ‘individualised’ framework to explain the nature of contemporary participation, particularly amongst minoritised religious youth. This paper examines this conceptual framework in light of concurrent claims that contemporary participation can be better conceptualised using a ‘doing it with others’ (DIWO) approach, which emphasises the collaborative nature of participation. In light of these claims, I analyse the participation experiences of 22 young adult Buddhist practitioners who are located within a neo-liberal Australian context, yet simultaneously have access to religious teachings and practices which challenge distinct notions of selfhood. This paper shows that both ‘DIY’ and ‘DIWO’ conceptions of participation find expression in the participation experiences of participants from the study, and that both DIY and DIWO approaches can additionally be seen as mutually reinforcing rather than distinctly contrasting. I propose a new concept of ‘disindividualisation’, suggesting that Maffesoli's concept of ‘disindividuation’ and Elias's work linking psychological development and social change should be considered in conjunction with an individualised or DIY perspective on youth participation to denote this kind of participatory work.     

‘It’s the way they do it’: Expressions of Agency in Child–Adult Relations at Home and School

This article examines children's (8–9 years) and young people’s (14–15 years) views about their own participation in decision‐making processes with adults, within the context of home and school in Norway. A difference‐centred theoretical perspective is used to identify children’s participation as expressions of agency embedded in intricate child–adult relations, in which children and adults are positioned differently. It is argued that children not necessarily ask for increased independence from adults, but rather to be recognised as ‘differently equal’ partners in shared decision‐making processes, where children are being treated with dignity and respect as valuable persons.     

‘All in all it is just a judgement call’: issues surrounding sexual consent in young people’s heterosexual encounters

In the UK, there has been growing concern about young people’s understanding of sexual consent, with the views of young people themselves often lost in academic and educational policy debates. However, the focus on high rates of sexual violence has meant a lack of attention on the everyday negotiation of consensual heterosexual activity, leading to assumptions being made regarding young people’s lack of understanding of sexual consent. This paper emerges from a wider study of over 500 young people which sought to uncover their understanding of the issues. Drawing on data from workshops and the open text responses to an on-line survey the findings presented in this paper show that the majority of heterosexual young people understood the complexity of sexual consent as an embodied process, which can be difficult to define, talk about or practice uniformly. This complex understanding, in which sexual consent is a continuum rather than a dichotomy, has implications for sexual education initiatives. We argue that it is only by providing a closer understanding of how – within consensual sexual activities – young people understand and enact sexual consent through a range of embodied communication strategies that education surrounding sexual assault will become meaningful.     

Rethinking mediated political engagement: social media ambivalence and disconnective practices of politically active youths in Hong Kong

Social media have been widely credited for facilitating young people’s political engagement, most notably by providing a conducive platform for political expression. There has been comparatively little attention, however, to the possible pitfalls for young people when they engage in politics on social media. In this study, we seek to redress the overemphasis on the strengths and connectivity of social media by attending to how young people negotiate their drawbacks and disconnectivity. Through in-depth interviews with young participants of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, we examine the choices and motives regarding mediated (non-)participation among a group of politically active youths. Our findings revealed that these young people’s social media ambivalence emerged from the major participatory experience. Despite their active and open informational sharing and political expression on social media alongside their in-person participation during the eventful protest, many young participants became wary of such expressive use owing to their perceptions of de-energization, disconnectedness, and disembodiment. Instead of completely withdrawing from political activities on social media, these politically inclined and technologically savvy youths embraced “disconnective practices” – passive engagement (lurking), selective expression (moderation and exposure-limitation), and offline participation (embodied collective action) – to avoid the overwhelming, fractious, and inauthentic conditions of mediated participation.     

Participation and Emotions: Troubling Encounters Between Children and Social Welfare Professionals

This paper explores the emotional aspects of participation within social welfare contexts. The focus is on individual professionals, such as social workers and children’s rights workers and their articulation, management and negotiation of the emotional when working with children and young people. The institutions of welfare are also shown to be ambiguous in their approaches to participation. Lastly, the dimensions of power that are enacted in relations between professionals and children reveal some of the complex dynamics in this fraught area of social welfare policy and practice.     

From Home to the Home Corner: Observing Children's Identity‐Maintenance in Early Childhood Settings

This article draws on data from two recent studies of young children in early childhood settings. One study was of children in a Korean private kindergarten, the other of children in a UK reception class. In each study, the data discussed include both evidence from ‘home’ (including parent interviews) and evidence from ‘school’ (including conversations with the children themselves) on the gendered and ethnic identities the children display in the classroom. The children's stated beliefs and preferences, and their observed choice of activities and friends, appear to be influenced both by the beliefs and behaviour of their families, and by the early childhood environments they are offered. The transition from home to group settings, it is suggested, may reinforce rather than diminish the stereotyping along gendered and ethnic lines, while participation in ‘research’ conversations may provide a rare opportunity for the children to question and reflect on stereotypes.
Copyright © 2006 The Author(s).     

A visual methods approach for researching children’s perspectives: capturing the dialectic and visual reflexivity in a cross-national study of father-child interactions

ABSTRACT

The paper presents a visual methods approach from a cross national methodological project that used digital visual technologies to examine young children's perspectives in father-child interactions. The approach combines capturing the dialectic with visual reflexivity. The notion of ‘capturing the dialectic’ specifically by analysing conflict to gather the child’s intention as their perspective, is underpinned by finding the contradictions in a situation of which children are a part. Visual technologies and in particular digital film does this, because it can identify difference, as it observes and captures the dialectic process. Researchers collected between 5–10 hours of film footage and twenty-four film elicitation interviews from young children and their fathers in twelve families within England, Hong Kong, Norway and India. In the study, participants took footage of routine father-child interactions chosen by the children; and researchers sampled the footage for situations of conflict and emotionally charged moments in order to capture the dialectic. Researchers then conducted film elicitation interviews with the children and fathers, which were recorded for the purpose of visual reflexivity. This visual methods approach can support social science researchers to address differences in representation and truth, for a better understanding of a young child’s perspective in cross-national projects.     

Variation within households in consent to link survey data to administrative records: evidence from the UK Millennium Cohort Study

This study expands our knowledge of consent in linking survey and administrative data by studying respondents’ behaviour when consenting to link their own records and when consenting to link those of their children. It develops and tests a number of hypothesised mechanisms of consent, some of which were not explored in the past. The hypotheses cover: parental pride, privacy concerns, loyalty to the survey, pre-existing relations with the agency holding the data, and interviewer effects. The study uses data from the longitudinal Millennium Cohort Study to analyse the correlates of consent in multiple domains (i.e. linkage of education, health and economic records). The findings show that respondent’s behaviour vary depending on the consent domain and on the person within the household for whom consent is sought. In particular, the cohort member’s cognitive skills and the main respondent’s privacy concerns have differential effects on consent. On the other hand, loyalty to the survey proxied by the longitudinal response history has a significant and strong impact on consent irrespective of the outcome. The findings also show that interviewers account for a large proportion of variations in consent even after controlling for the characteristics of the interviewer’s assignment area. In total, it is possible to conclude that the significant impact of some of the correlates will lead to sample bias which needs to be accounted for when working with linked survey and administrative data.     

Supporting the Participation of Disabled Children and Young People in Decision‐making

Increasing children's and young people's participation in decisions, about their own care and about service development, is a policy priority. Although in general participation is increasing, disabled children are less likely to be involved than non‐disabled children and it is unclear to what extent children with complex needs or communication impairments are being included in participation activities. This article presents research exploring factors to support good practice in participation and discusses policy and practice implications.     

Children’s consent to child welfare services: Some explorative remarks

In this article, children consenting to a care order proposal is explored as a form of meaningful participation as seen by care-experienced young people. In contrast to health care and research ethics, almost no research exists on children's consent to child welfare measures. The findings suggest that instead of approaching children as individualistic rights-holders, a more relational understanding about consenting is required, both conceptually and in practice, to acknowledge the social, emotional and power relations in which children's consent (or objection) becomes topical in child welfare. Without that recognition, consenting may be far from meaningful participation.