Researching with children using Skype interviews and drawings: Methodological and ethical issues explored

This article explores methodological and ethical issues of researching with children, drawing on a project exploring children’s perceptions of having a mother studying in Higher Education. While most prior research concentrates on a mother’s view of her children, this article uniquely focuses on children’s views on their mother. From analysis of the data and reflections on the research experience, the following themes emerged, the benefits and challenges of using drawing or Skype as a research method and ethical issues when working with children. Reflecting a view of children as competent and knowledgeable participants within research, I argue that children should be given opportunities to discuss a range of topics that concern them and advocate doing research ‘with’ rather than ‘on’ children. Throughout this article, the children’s and mothers’ voices are interjected to provide a narrative offering insights into family life from a child’s perspective thus revealing the impact of this research on the mother.

Co-Researching With Children in the Time of COVID-19: Shifting the Narrative on Methodologies to Generate Knowledge

Children and young people’s participation in decision-making has substantially increased in the last 3 decades; although, their participation in research has been more problematic due to traditional views that exclude them from the realm of knowledge generation. This article critically reflects on the way that 12 children and young people engaged as co-researchers in an intergenerational research project that explored the perspectives of children and young people during the COVID-19 outbreak. Drawing upon the experiences of these child researchers, the author discusses the methodological and ethical complexities of their engagement—which is already a disputed topic—in the context of the global health crisis characterized by lockdowns, isolation, and social distancing. The author outlines the strategic role that the child researchers had in reaching their peers and collecting relevant data, which would not have been possible without them, due to the circumstances of the pandemic. Furthermore, it is argued the need to rethink the role of children and young people as partners in research, especially in times of crises, and to embrace the epistemological position that they are able to deliver quality research results. The generation of collective knowledge is intertwined with relations, situations, and contexts, and together they influence each other, making the research project dynamic and unconceivable without the child researchers.

Listening to Young Children: A Mosaic approach

The inclusion of children’s responses in research of educational settings are important and have been described as a pertinent tool to understand and be aware of children’s perspectives that adults may not be aware of (Lundqvist, 2014). Sheridan (2011) further expresses that the “evaluation of quality of early childhood education must include the voices of children” and is an essential part of the overall understanding of early childhood education. The responses and voices of young children reflect diverse forms of communicating, representing and interpreting their thoughts and emotions. This paper will present some models that can help guide the researcher to make decisions about how a child can participate in the research activity. Specifically, I will describe the use of an ethnographic combined with Clark and Moss’s Mosaic approach to researching with children.

Research with Children: Context, Power, and Representation

In this article, we examine methodological issues qualitative researchers encounter when they engage in research with children. Within this view, qualitative research is employed with children but not on children and focus is placed upon children’s voices, agency, and the ways they participate with researchers in the research process (Einarsdóttir, 2007). Our discussion draws upon a study we conducted with four- and five-year-old children on the preschool playground. We reflect upon methodological issues pertaining to researching with children; issues of context, power, and representation.

Researching With Children of the Anthropocene

This chapter takes the age of Anthropocene as the time of human entanglement in the fate of the planet, dated by some from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We propose, however, that the full awareness of the consequences of this entanglement will only be felt by children born in the twenty-first century into an entirely different world than the one we know and understand. Interestingly, in the light of this contention, early childhood leads the field of educational research in posthuman scholarship, which we associate with the rise of scholarly work galvanised around the notion of the Anthropocene. These approaches draw variously on Haraway's common worlds, Barad's new materialism, and Deleuze and Guatarri's nomadic philosophies.