The Ethics of Unlocking Research with Children: Creativity, Agency and Change(Emerald Studies in Child Centred Practice)

It is recognised by researchers that children’s voices must be included in shaping knowledge and understanding of social life. However, a consistent barrier to co-produced or participatory research is ethical decision making, impacting the type and nature of research that is granted approval. If we are to respond to the UNs Sustainable Development Goals, which demands a unity of purpose, children’s voices must be enabled and ensuring effective ethical frameworks to enable research with children is critical. Advances have been made to the role children play in research. However, there is a tension between the creativity that informs efforts to allow children to participate and rigid and limiting models and frameworks for ethical oversight. This edited collection takes on an underrepresented topic by investigating the ethical considerations that impact on what research is or is not approved, through chapters that look at competence, consent, methodologies, safeguarding, assessment, and meaningful participation. Exploring the extent to which ‘ethical’ decision making has become limited by institutional understandings of children as ‘objects’, or at best ‘subjects’, within a research process, this collection invites us to start to reimagine a process in which child centred practices are at the centre of encouraging a more fluid and relational method of managing risks and vulnerabilities. The Ethics of Unlocking Research with Children seeks to understand the challenges and offers solutions to maximise research opportunities with children.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1. An introduction: Our journey to unlock the ethics of research with children; Sam Frankel Part I Section Commentaries Chapter 2. Promoting ethical research: Identifying the gap in research ethics application processes; Libby Robinson Part II Chapter 3. Who’s afraid of research with children? Perspectives and Reflections; Anne-Marie Smith Chapter 4. Listening to children’s voices about family life: Ethical dilemmas in researching their experience of parental separation and divorce; Susan Kay-Flowers Chapter 5. Covid-19 and young children’s wellbeing: Creative methodologies and children’s perspectives; Nicky Hirst Part III Chapter 6. School-based research with youth: When protection leads to disconnection; Jennifer Silcox, Laura Rosen, and Tara Bruno Chapter 7. Empowering children: Ethical decision making in research through a strength-based approach; Michelle Dwerryhouse and Lauren Hall Chapter 8. ‘This is a healthy relationship’ school pupils as researchers and equals; Janette Porter Part IV Chapter 9. Childcare ethics: Is ethics a childcaring one?; Judith Enriquez Chapter 10. ‘Story creators, being human and minimal risk’: A collaborative inclusion project for university students and pupils in the Liverpool City Region (LCR) with Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND); Nicky Hirst and Ceri Daniels Chapter 11. The ethical dilemma of supporting children impacted by parental imprisonment, an adverse childhood experience, to have their views heard in spaces where their voices, faces and /or names might also be seen and heard; Lorna Brookes Chapter 12. A closing thought and next steps; Susan Kay-Flowers

About the Author :
Sam Frankel is Founder and Chief Executive of Learning Allowed, with roles as Associate Professor at King’s University College, Canada, Visiting Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK and Adjunct Professor at Western University, Canada. Sam is Series Editor for Emerald Studies in Child Centred Practice. Susan Kay-Flowers is Senior Lecturer in Education and Early Childhood Studies at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. Sue’s research interests are participatory research with children and young people, particularly giving 'voice' to children’s experiences.