Ethical dilemmas in research with children and young people about their social environments

Abstract

There has been a very welcome recent growth in research directly with and by children and young people, with a wide range of reporting children's own views and experiences. Research ethics has also recently been receiving a great deal of attention, and there are debates about the extent to which research with children differs from research with other groups. This paper draws on the author's experiences of empirical sociological research with 12–15-year-olds conducted in a deprived town in SE England in the late 1990s that explored children and young people's social networks and neighbourhoods, and the implications for their health and well-being (social capital). The paper focuses on some ethical dilemmas raised during the research, and concludes with a discussion of broader issues related to dissemination and the policy implications of research

Keywords:

• ethics of research with children;
• research methods;
• neighbourhoods;
• social capital

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the young people who participated in the research and to the staff at their schools who facilitated the research. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at conferences at Brunel University ‘Emerging issues in the geographies of children and youth’ and at University of Glasgow ‘Ethical issues in research with children’ in 2005, and the author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers, as well as Nancy Bell and Peter Hopkins for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Virginia Morrow

Email: [email protected]