Ethical issues in listening to young children in visual participatory research

ABSTRACT

Ethical issues involving young children in research are complex and individual to each child, requiring the researcher to be reflexive and aware of the nature of the child’s participation. This paper draws on the experiences of 16 5- to 7-year-old children, transitioning from kindergarten to first grade in Chile as reported by them through visual participatory research. Integral to the ethical principles were the use of a visual participatory design, a listening framework and the child’s rights perspective. In order to be faithful to the research design proposed, different ethical guidelines were revised and followed to ensure protection, anonymity, the right to withdraw and privacy to the children deciding to get involved in the research process. Essential to this work was recognising the child as the most knowledgeable agent in her/his own experiences in order to minimise issues of power and increase children’s awareness during the data collection process. Findings from the study demonstrate different situations in which the researcher’s self-reflexivity can enhance positive outcomes related to ethical issues and young children’s ability to understand the research process, communicate meanings and jointly create new meanings through the tools provided and activities proposed. Ethical challenges and implications for future research with children are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• School transition
• active learning
• visual participatory research
• ethics
• children’s consent

Acknowledgements

Dr. David Whitebread, Principal Research Associate at the Faculty of Education from the University of Cambridge is acknowledged for supervising this research and his valuable comments on this paper. I also thank Professor Kristiina Kumpulainen, from the University of Helsinki for her feedback to this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Daniela Sofía Jadue Roa, PhD, is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Advanced Research in Education (CIAE) at the University of Chile. Daniela is a qualified Early Childhood and Primary School educator herself and followed studies of Masters in Psychology and Education and Doctoral Studies in Education at the University of Cambridge in England. Currently her research focuses on young children's perspectives of their transitions to school, their sense of agency development and inclusion of the rights perspective in educational research policy and practice.

Notes

1. The University of Chile has an Ethical Committee for Social Sciences Research located at the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities which is widely validated and assesses rigorously the ethical procedures of the projects presented to them (http://cedea.uchile.cl/?page_id=8); there is also another committee at the Faculty of social sciences of the same University http://www.facso.uchile.cl/facultad/presentacion/107053/comite-de-etica-de-la-investigacion). Lastly the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile also has a regular ethical procedure (http://investigacion.uc.cl/Etica-UC/instructivos-e-informacion-relevante.html).

Additional information

Funding

I thank The Chilean National Corporation of Research Science and Technology (CONICYT), Cambridge Overseas Trust (University of Cambridge funding scheme and Chile Projects (Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge) for funding this research. I thank funding from PIA-CONICYT Basal Funds for Centers of Excellence Project BF0003 for supporting the writing.