Giving children their due voice in human resource management research

ABSTRACT

Parental reporting has long been the dominant method of determining children’s views when researching Human Resource Management (HRM). This prevailing adultist approach ignores the potential for children’s voices to make empirical, theoretical, and practical contributions to the study and practice of HRM. The purpose of this paper is twofold. In the first instance, building on Kavanagh’s (2013) broad call to address the white space around children and organisational studies, this paper seeks to highlight the key areas of HRM research where children have the potential to make a significant contribution to our empirical and theoretical understanding of work and life and our subsequent managerial recommendations. In the second instance, it builds on existing scholarship, while drawing on the author’s own experiences, to provide practical suggestions for addressing ethical challenges that are more pronounced when interviewing children – obtaining their informed consent, mitigating the potential for harm arising from power imbalances, and consideration of their right to privacy and confidentiality. This is in response to the demand for additional resources to support those who are willing give voice to children in their research.

KEYWORDS:

• HRM research methods
• Qualitative
• Work-family nexus
• Children’s voice

Introduction

Our role as researchers is to investigate and inform, and yet for those of us whose Human Resource Management (HRM) research is ultimately aimed at providing organisations with evidence based HRM guidance, we for the most part continue to ignore the potential for children’s voices to empirically support our theoretical constructs and our managerial recommendations. The purpose of this paper is twofold. In the first instance, building on Kavanagh’s (2013) broad call to address the white space around children and organisational studies, it highlights the specific areas where moving away from the prevailing adultist approach to HRM research will make a significant contribution to our understanding of work and life. Children, defined as anyone under the age of 18, have long been recognised by the United Nations as entitled to express their view on matters affecting them (UNICEF 1989). They are also accepted as the experts on their own lives (Morrow and Richards 1996), who are able to provide a rich account of their lived experiences beyond that of any adult reporting on their behalf (Sorin 2003). It therefore seems that the current adultist approach of HRM researchers, who remain reliant on adults as proxies for affected children (Casper et al. 2007), is untenable.

In the second instance the paper builds on existing scholarship to provide additional practical guidance on how to conduct ethically robust research interviews with children. The demand for additional resources to support those who are willing to give a voice to children in their research remains (Graham et al. 2015). The guidance draws upon on my own experiences while researching the impact of contemporary global mobility, where I interviewed the families of 21 international yachtsmen who travel extensively for their work. While the sport of sailing is now arguably a leader in gender equality, primarily through the early implementation of gender quotas, at the time of my study those who had reached the top echelon of the professional sport, and therefore engaged in extensive travel, were almost exclusively male. Accepting that this was a limitation of my study, I do not believe it significantly impacted my methodological approach to interviewing the sailors’ children or the subsequent reflections on my experience that form the foundation of this paper.

As a member of the international yachting fraternity, and therefore, as Ganga and Scott (2006) suggest, a cultural insider, I was afforded the rare opportunity of being granted access to the school-aged children of the sailors, many who had lived their whole lives either trailing their father around the world or staying behind with their mother. As will be discussed, this status positively affected my initial rapport with the children and contributed to reducing the inherent power balance that exists between adult researchers and child participants (Hatfield et al. 2010; O’Kane 2008). It must be acknowledged that over-identification with one’s participants can lead to an overly empathetic approach and an unwillingness to depict interviewees unfavourably (Brinkmann and Kvale 2015). However, I believe awareness is a precursor to reflexivity and remained conscious of the need to constantly reflect on how my insider status could be influencing the research process throughout all stages of my study. My approach at the time was informed by the seminal work of Guillemin and Gillam (2004) who believe reflexivity is ‘a sensitising notion that can enable ethical practice to occur in the complexity and richness of social research’ (2004, 278). Subsequently Collins and McNulty (2020) have identified transparency, to both participants and in reporting, as also important when redressing the challenges faced by cultural insiders. I made it very clear to the children during the consent process that I was a member of their community. I also explicitly identified my status in any reporting related to my study, just as I have done here. I therefore believe that the benefits of my insider status, the most important of which is arguably access to those who otherwise would not have been heard, significantly outweighed any remaining risk of bias. Others who to gain access to children as cultural insiders should also be aware of the potential challenges arising from their status and act accordingly.

Consistent with the overarching constructionist methodology of the research project, and the emerging nature of the topic, I combined photo elicitation with a semi-structured approach to interviewing the children. The semi-structured interviews followed an interview guide informed by the both the existing scholarship, and my experiences as a stay-behind partner. The impact of using photo elicitation, and the structure of the interview guide, will be discussed at a later point.

The findings from my research project reinforce the importance of giving children their own voice, both in terms of being able to tell their own story, and in providing a sometimes-disparate perspective to that provided by a co-located parent, being the parent who is living with the child as opposed to the traveller.

The remainder of this paper is structured around its two key contributions. The following section seeks to highlight the prevailing methodological preference of HRM researchers to exclude stakeholder children, and the key areas of HRM research where these children have the potential to make a significant contribution to our empirical and theoretical understanding of work and life. The subsequent sections draw on my own experiences to provide additional practical suggestions for addressing the ethical challenges that are more pronounced when interviewing children.

The dearth of children’s voices in current HRM research

The absence of the child in HRM research becomes evident when you scrutinise the existing scholarship. A search of the Web of Science and Scopus databases in March 2022, using the topics ‘Human Resource Management’ and ‘child*’ yielded a small number of articles where children were consulted over matters that affect them. These include giving voice to the children whose lives are impacted by family-friendly workplace practices, for example through dyadic parent-child questionnaires (Lawson et al. 2016; Orellana et al. 2021) and single respondent surveys (Krstić and Matić 2020), albeit while not always explicitly considering the potential organisational outcomes (McHale et al. 2016). A small number of studies also considered the children’s perspective on maternal employment, focusing on individual outcomes such as the children’s well-being (Vahedi et al. 2019) and societal labour market and policy outcomes (Millar and Ridge 2009). Children’s perspectives on paternal employment however appear fundamentally non-existent. A single study by MacBeth, Kaczmarek and Sibbel (2012) giving voice to the adolescent sons of fathers engaged in Fly-in-Fly-out (FIFO) global mobility appears to be the only study of its kind.

The study of International HRM is arguably the HRM research domain where children are most often heard, being given a voice to contribute to our understanding of the potential organisational outcomes related to their global mobility experiences. Examples include the seminal study by Caligiuri et al. (1998) drawing on interviews with pre and post departure expatriate families (albeit conducted by consultants specialising in global relocations) to better understand the organisational support required, and more recently, studies giving voice to expatriate children to help determine the antecedents of their cultural adjustment (van der Zee et al. 2007; Weeks et al. 2010).

The limited number of examples where children have been afforded a voice within HRM scholarship, and the often-narrow focus of those who do, raises the question why as HRM researchers our methodological preferences continue to exclude all affected stakeholders?

The methodological argument for the inclusion of children’s voices

Despite the growing number of disciplines affording children their voice by including them as research participants (Ben‐Arieh and Kosher 2019), there remains a predominant absence of methodological diversity among work-family researchers (Beigi and Shirmohammadi 2017), discounting the potential for all family members to contribute to HRM research, and evidence based HRM outcomes (Kossek et al. 2011).

Throughout our discipline, there continues to be an enduring element of adultist reluctance (Hatfield et al. 2010) to forefront children’s perspectives as potentially unique from their parents (Casper et al. 2007; White et al. 2011). The importance of including both views becomes apparent when considering the discrepancies reported between parent and child participants in military mobility (Chandra et al. 2010) and more general migration (Ní Laoire et al. 2010) research. An example from my own research was the difference between the children and their co-located parent’s attitude in relation to visiting the travelling parent on location. For almost every child, the primary benefit of having a parent who travelled for work was the opportunity to visit them on location as indicated by two children from two different families:

I have friends who haven’t even left the States, they have been there their entire lives and to think that I have been to these amazing places. I wouldn’t give that up for anything.

The best thing would definitely be the travelling … it’s just a good experience for us all, seeing new places.

The co-located parents however, were reluctant to take their children out of school, to take time from their own employment, and undertake expensive travel to a location where the traveller was invariably too busy to spend time with them, as respectively reflected in the following:

If we feel like we need to go see [traveller] we can always go, we’ve always been welcome, but the problem is with the schools…you don’t want to interrupt their education.

I’ve gone back to work, so [we] generally have to stay here.

No! And it’s too expensive to. It gobbles into the income. We will do a family trip at one stage.

We don’t generally travel with him because you don’t see them anyway. They’re there for work, we are just a distraction.

Understanding the significance the children place on this opportunity allows parents to perhaps consider that visiting the traveller is important enough to justify the inconvenience, and to inform organisations of the potential benefits of travel budgets and scheduled time-off for employees during family visits.

The prevailing adultist approach has led to an enduring reliance on adult proxies, that no matter how well intentioned, are ‘unlikely to be able to accurately represent children’s social worlds’ (Mishna et al. 2004, 451) given their bias towards fitting the behaviours they observe into their own preconceptions of the situation (Weller et al. 2013). An example from my own research came about when discussing whether it was better to keep the children fully informed of the traveller’s schedule or to be deliberately obtuse around the traveller’s plans to avoid disappointment if changes occur. While one participant was adamant that the disappointment the children experienced was significant if the traveller’s plans changed and therefore, was always deliberately vague about when he was due home, her children indicated they found the lack of clarity around when their father might be home frustrating – as the following exerts from their respective interviews illustrate:

Parent: I tend to, a couple of days before, just say ‘Dad’s off’. [They ask] “How long is he gone for“? [I say] ‘I don’t know’ … I don’t want them to have in their head space, oh, he’s away for ten days and it suddenly becomes six weeks, eight weeks. It’s just like, Dad’s gone, and I don’t know how long is he gone for.

Children’s Interview:

Eldest sibling: They don’t tell us, Mum doesn’t or Dad doesn’t tell us when he’s coming back.

Younger sibling: Because he might miss a flight.

Eldest sibling: Mum said it’s because we’ll keep asking ‘is he coming home now’? But we ask more when we don’t know, because we don’t know when he’s coming home.

Whilst her approach to handling the situation, and how she described her choices during her interview, were well intentioned and a true reflection of her understanding of the situation, giving voice to her children unearthed a discrepancy between the parent’s perceptions and the children’s actual lived experiences.

The findings of my study therefore support the assertion that children, and not adult proxies, should be acknowledged as the experts on their own lives (Morrow and Richards 1996; Sorin 2003). Given their right to express their view on matters affecting them (UNICEF 1989) the following section considers the specific contexts where I believe children have the potential to make the most significant individual, organisational and even societal contribution.

Where children could make the most significant contribution to HRM research

So where do children have the greatest potential to empirically inform HRM theory and practice? Where could they make the greatest contribution to our understanding of the individual, organisational and even societal impact of HRM? The following sections highlight those areas where I believe children could and should be heard.

The ever-elusive Work-Life-Balance

The additional blurring of work-life boundaries is one of the societal changes attributed to COVID-19 (Allen et al. 2021). This disruption of the existing relationship between work and family and life (Collings et al. 2021; Kniffin et al. 2021; Rudolph et al. 2021) has once again focused our attention on the challenge of how to balance work and life.

The attainment of work-life-balance (WLB) has many potential positive outcomes (Guest 2002). For example, facilitating employees WLB can reduce their turnover intentions (Cohen 1997), another particularly pertinent issue given the current conversation around the ‘great resignation’ (McKinsey 2021) and the enduring war for talent (McNulty 2018). And yet, while the overall impact of spillover between work and home, and vice versa, is a topic that has been well researched, including incorporating the perspective of the partners of employees (for example see Demerouti 2012; Takeuchi et al. 2002), little is known about the perspective of another key stakeholder, the employees’ children.

One example of where children should be heard is around the potential moderating role of the work-family nexus on organisational outcomes. For example, while WLB can positively spillover to employee engagement, a moderating factor is stress due to family dissatisfaction (Chakraborty et al. 2020). Family well-being as an emotional resource has also been identified as a moderator in the relationship between work-family conflict (a contributor to work-life-balance) and organisational citizenship behaviour (Lin et al. 2021). The issue is that these findings that highlight how family dynamics can impact organisational outcomes are based solely on employees’ perceptions. Surely an improved understanding of the constructs of family dissatisfaction and family well-being, informed by the entire family, has the potential to focus interventions and positively impact the individual and organisational outcomes. Based on my research it was apparent that while some of the co-located parents identified the need for personal time when the traveller was at home to replenish their own resources, contributing to their own family satisfaction and well-being, many of the children demanded more concentrated time with the whole family. For example, one co-located parent described a recent experience when the traveller returned home just after the local school holidays:

We went for a holiday, which I was a little bit like, I’ve just had the kids all school holidays and then [the traveller] comes home and says ‘let’s go on a ski holiday’ and it’s kind of like, well how about we just get the kids to school and I have a day off.

While the children did not mention the particular ski holiday, they did mention how they had asked for, and been granted, a family day at a local amusement park during the traveller’s most recent time at home. Such differences, with the potential to impact both the afore mentioned family satisfaction and well-being, would not have been identified without giving voice to the affected children.

There are others who have also recognised this gap in the existing work-life-balance research. Morr Loftus and Drosser (2020) concur that children have the potential to contribute to the spillover conversation while McNall et al. (2009) believe the voice of family members will contribute to developing a more comprehensive theory of the least examined element of the work-life-balance, being the potential for positive work-family enrichment.

One path to attaining WLB is targeted organisational responses aimed at addressing the antecedents of work-family conflict (Darcy and McCarthy 2007; Jung and Tae 2012) and yet the impact of these family-friendly policies continues to be somewhat underwhelming in terms of organisational outcomes (Guest 2002; Masterson et al. 2021). Authors have even questioned their own findings around the impact of family-friendly HRM practices, calling for a much larger body of evidence (Evans et al. 2022). These arguments indicate that additional perspectives, including those of the affected children, should contribute to our understanding of the effectiveness of such interventions. While there may be those who argue that children may not necessarily discern organisational support, it is worth noting that in my research a number of the children clearly identified the absence of organisational support for the co-located parent. The key points noted by the children was the absence of an established communication channel between the co-located parent and the employer, and a dearth of logistical support on the occasions the family would travel. These are clearly summarised in the following statement:

They wouldn’t offer you any support. They didn’t contact us, or Mum, even once when Dad was away. They had nothing to do with us.

While my findings were definitely specific to the context of my study where the yachtsmen were often at sea and uncontactable, the fact the absence of organisational support was noted by the children stands.

Parental Employment

As noted, a small number of studies have included children’s voices when researching parental employment, albeit invariably from the perspective of maternal employment. This arguably reflects the overall broadly gendered approach to such research, where career studies have historically focused on men conforming to the ideal worker norm, while work-family studies have focused on women’s careers (Kossek et al. 2021).

I believe that there is the potential for children to make a significant contribution to a stream of scholarship where there are growing concerns around discrimination against both males and females whose caregiving roles deviate from existing gendered norms (Kossek et al. 2021). The decision about when to opt-back in to employment outside the home is often driven by a belief that a parent, normatively the mother, is required at home for their children’s well-being (Cabrera 2007). But are such decisions based on all the available information? In my own research, one of the participants was choosing to give up full-time employment as she felt she was not supporting her three (school-age) sons during their father’s work-related absences:

Well it is because they’ve already got one parent away. [The traveller’s] away and he’s not around for them. By me going to work, I’m not there for them then either. I know I haven’t left the country, but I’m still over at [her place of work], and they’re all back at home in the house.

However, each of her sons stated they were happy with the status quo and happy with their mother working:

Interviewer: So, do you mind Mum working?

Youngest child: Ah, no

Middle child: It’s cool

Interviewer: You know she says she is going to resign next year?

Oldest child: I don’t rely on Mum. She doesn’t need to be at home when we get home from school. She should stay at [her place of work].

Research giving voice to the children of parents who are actively considering their career options could better inform their decisions and potentially contribute to the challenges that exist in a society where the gendered expectations around the ideal worker norm remain.

Work-place bullying

Another area where children’s voices should be heard is around the impact of work-place bullying, including the impact of the growing instances of cyberbullying that have emerged with the largescale adoption of ICT (Sarkar 2015). Bullying in the workplace can significantly impact individuals’ physical and mental well-being, while the potential negative organisational outcomes include declining commitment and performance (Boudrias et al. 2021).

In a small number of instances, the impact of bullying has been examined through the work-family lens. For example one study considered how being a parent can influence the impact workplace bullying has on nurses, albeit from the perspective of the nurses (Karatza et al. 2017). However, whether the impact of the bullying spills over into employees’ children’s lives has yet to be considered. Giving children the opportunity to express how they are impacted by their parent being bullied, and the impact they perceive the unsafe work environment is having on their parent, has the potential to inform work-place interventions. Such interventions have the potential to engender not only individual and organisational outcomes but also societal expectations around our right to ‘decent work’.

The International Context

Finally, as already indicated, the one domain where children’s voices, or at least adolescent voices, have on occasion been heard is in the study of International HRM. However, there is more the globally mobile children of all ages could teach us. For example, are the expatriate children of today going to harness their cultural intelligence and become the future leaders of globalised society? There has been one study asking adults to consider whether their childhood expatriate experiences impacted their career choices as adults (Westropp et al. 2016), but it wouldn’t it be interesting to understand whether these children are in fact becoming culturally literate during their formative years? This could also help us identify and target individuals for the globally mobile workforce of the future.

Other aspects of International HRM research – including expatriate adjustment, repatriation, and the impact of staying behind – could also benefit from input by stakeholder children given the recognised relationship between family adjustment, as facilitated by organisational support, and organisational outcomes (For example see: Caligiuri et al. 1998; Takeuchi et al. 2005; McNulty and Hutchings 2016). My call to include children as stakeholders in the expatriate experience echoes that of IHRM-focused scholars (For example see: Dittman et al. 2016; Lämsä et al. 2017; de Sivatte et al. 2019). Such research should include children of all ages, given the acknowledged impact of the age of children on expatriate outcomes, if IHRM theory is to be more fully empirically supported (Goede and Holtbrügge 2021).

The aim of the paper so far has been to present a case for including children’s voices in HRM research. This is consistent with the overarching argument that children have the right to have their views recognised on all matters that affect them (Lundy 2007), as is practice across multiple other social science disciplines (Ben‐Arieh and Kosher 2019). If you accept that methodologically we need to expand our participant pool, the next step is to ensure we as HRM scholars do so in an ethically robust manner. The following section introduces a framework through which we can view research with children as participants, before providing practical guidance on how this may be achieved.

Ethically robust interviewing of children

The fundamental ethical paradox we experience as researchers is found in the desire to probe beyond the surface and provide participants with a rich voice, and yet maintain a level of respect that does not trespass upon their rights (Brinkmann and Kvale 2015). Children, as participants, give rise to essentially the same ethical concerns as adults, but require particular attention due to the potential intensification of the issues (Soffer and Ben-Arieh 2013).

Throughout my research project Guillemin and Gillam (2004) guided not only how I mitigated my insider status, but also my overarching approach towards the prevailing procedural ethics, my own ethics-in-practice and the need to recognise ethically important moments. My approach was further informed by reading around research conducted by the Childwatch International Research Network (For example see: Graham et al. 2015; Powell et al. 2011) highlighting three key ethical concerns that may be intensified when giving a voice to children: informed consent, harms and benefits, privacy and confidentiality.

The remainder of the paper draws on this guiding framework to underpin practical advice on conducting ethically robust interviews with child research participants. The focus is on those aspects of my approach that I believe add to the existing yet incomplete bank of resources currently available to support those whose research does give children a voice (Graham et al. 2015).

Informed consent

Informed consent by participants requires a full understanding of the type of research that they are agreeing to, and the topics that will be covered. Consent must also be voluntary with participants having the right to discontinue at any point throughout the process (Brinkmann and Kvale 2015). Children are deemed to possess the competency to provide consent when they are considered articulate (Melton 1983), and have been adequately informed of the process they are consenting to (Fargas-Malet et al. 2010). The generally accepted assumption is that once children have reached school age, they are considered able to provide consent – if appropriately managed by an adult researcher.

While the institute under which I was conducting my research required only that I gain consent from the parents of any participants under 15 years old, (which was obtained prior to coming into contact with the children), consistent with Guillemin and Gillam’s (2004) assertion that the ultimate ethical responsibility falls to the researcher, I believed there was an ethical obligation to the children to ensure they independently provided informed consent to participate. It is interesting to note that in 2017 the institution updated its ethical guidelines and where possible researchers are now required to obtain autonomous consent from children under the age of 16 using age-appropriate forms. This revision was guided by submissions from the research community, indicating ethical practice informing procedural ethics, a positive step towards reducing the practice of procedural box ticking (Guillemin and Gillam 2004).

Prior to commencing the interviews each of the children were presented with their own age-adapted information sheet which incorporated a specifically designed consent form. The form explained who I was and what I specifically wanted to talk to them about. The following text was in the opening paragraph of the form:

I am doing a study to try and understand what happens when Dad goes overseas and the rest of your family stays behind. I am doing this to try and find out how we can make it easier for everyone in your family when Dad travels for work.

The aim of this was to get the children to hopefully adopt the goal of making staying behind ‘easier for everyone’ as their own, resolving the ethical tension between the purpose of the researcher and the participant individual’s right to their own purpose (Guillemin and Gillam 2004).

While the language was arguably somewhat simplistic for the high school age participants, I explained to them that this was not meant to be condescending but to ensure their younger siblings could also fully understand what I was asking of them. The form also included an assurance of confidentiality which I verbally explained to them by comparing my academic supervisors to school teachers and confirming even they would not know who the children were. This was consistent with Pinter and Zandian’s (2012) concept of anonymity and confidentiality. Following Kirk (2007), I was also conscious to explicitly advise each child that whilst their parents had provided consent for them to be interviewed, they were entitled to make up their own minds, and were not obliged to continue. Two children were initially reticent, and I told each of them that was perfectly acceptable and that they could leave. They both however decided to sign the form and stay, with one child subsequently becoming an active and articulate contributor.

Developing an age-appropriate form specifically targeted at the potential participants, and verbally discussing the content of the form, enabled me to obtain informed consent from children who were aged as young as 5-years-old. However, it is worth noting that two of the families were comprised of a 5-year-old girl and 7-year-old boy, and in both instances the girls were substantially more articulate and questioning, both when it came to the process of obtaining their consent, and their overall contribution to the interview process. Whilst variability in children’s intellectual and emotional development is to be expected (Grieve and Hughes 1990), in this context it highlights the need for constant ethics-in-practice (Dorner 2014; Guillemin and Gillam 2004) throughout each step of the research process to avoid arbitrarily accepting an absolute age as that where informed consent can be obtained.

A point worth noting is that while a pilot-study was conducted where the consent forms and the interview guides were tested with two adult participants, the clarity of the age-appropriate form was not piloted with any child participants. I now recognise this as a limitation of my study and would recommend such a check is undertaken by any future researchers seeking informed consent from potential child participants.

There are those who assume children are only capable of assent not informed consent (Kellett and Ding 2004), while others seek only passive approval from guardians, relying on the children to provide consent (Morrow 2001). I however contend that while a guardian’s judgement about what is best for their child remains important, and therefore procedural ethics around adult consent should not be diminished to a box ticking exercise, to move away from our enduring adultist approach to research, and to address the key ethical challenge of children providing their own informed consent, care must be taken to ensure that the written forms, the verbal explanations, and the reflective practice throughout the interview process, coalesce to ensure children remain participants in and not subject to our research.

Harms and Benefits

Giving children voice must never be at the risk of harm, and without a perceived benefit from participation the purpose of the research itself comes under question (Graham et al. 2015). As previously discussed, the perceived benefit for the child participants in my study was to improve the outcomes of global mobility for all members of their family. The greatest risk of harm was tied to the inherent power inequalities that exist between adult researchers and child participants (Morrow and Richards 1996). Consistent with Mishna et al.’s (2004) suggestion that we should implement a combination of strategies to collectively reduce any power imbalance, the following sections detail the various strategies I believe were the most effective in minimising the potential for harm.

Group interviews in the children’s homes

Children are ‘used to having a voice and being listened to in their homes’ (Bushin 2007, 243) and therefore conducting research on their territory is considered constructive when aiming to redress the inherent power imbalance between adult researcher and child participant (Punch 2002; Soffer and Ben-Arieh 2013). On a number of occasions during my research, this manifested by a child being able to find an artefact in their home and using this to tell me a story, which in turn gave them the confidence to answer my subsequent questions. These artefacts ranged from a boomerang a child had been given when their parent returned from a recent trip, to a magazine with the child’s father featured on the front cover. I was also able to draw out reticent children by referring to something I could see in the room, examples include sporting certificates stuck to the fridge and a ‘family timetable’ on a chalk board. While there is the potential for the artefacts to influence the subject matter (Hennessy and Heary 2005) I believe the benefits in terms of engendering the children with power balancing confidence outweigh any risks to the data. There are, however, other disadvantages to interviewing in the family home. These include distractions, such as the interruptions of other family members who are not participating in the interview process, and in my particular case, the omnipresence of the children’s mothers. This will be discussed further when looking at the children’s right to privacy.

Seminal sociological researcher Berry Mayall considers the social context of a group interview important in assisting to empower children’s confidence when conversing with adult researchers (2008). The potential for the support of brothers and sisters to ‘dilute the power dynamics’ (Hill 2006, 81) prompted my decision to conduct sibling and not individual interviews. Group interviews not only reduce the salience of the researcher (Mayall 1999), but can be more effective than one-on-one situations as the siblings co-construct their family stories together (Starkweather 2012). There are, however, difficulties associated with group, and particularly sibling, interviews. Individual children may dominate group interviews (Giddings and Yarwood 2005), in particular the oldest child may answer on behalf of their younger siblings, or make them hesitant to offer an alternative answer to the one provided by the family’s first born (Punch 2007). Following the practical techniques suggested by Bushin (2007) derived from her experiences interviewing children during migration research, I always attempted to neutralise the eldest child by addressing questions to specific children, often in reverse age order. This was not always successful as there were still instances of the younger children parroting the older children, however, overall the strategy proved effective. It was evident that the individual children drew support from their siblings, growing in confidence, becoming increasingly effusive, and diminishing the power imbalance. This confirmed the choice of group interviews as appropriate for my study.

Breaking down the inherent power imbalance between adult researchers and child participants’ requires significant reflection by the researcher on where, how and when the interviews should take place. Based on my experience, conducting the interview in the family home, and providing them wherever possible with the support of their siblings, contributes to rebalancing the scales. The following sections provides additional detail on the how and when of the interview process.

The timing and structure of the children’s interviews

Interviewing the co-located parent first contributed to the establishment of rapport with the children when I was able to reiterate a story their parent had described, especially if it involved a humorous incident or one where I could draw on my own experiences as a cultural insider so the children felt more comfortable with me (Moore et al. 2008). This was even more important in the few instances where for demographic reasons the children were interviewed alone. Where multiple generations of participants are to be included in research, interviewing the children after their guardian, has the potential to provide ways to redress the imbalance through introducing stories – as long as the researcher remembers that the story has been in the first instance told from the adult’s perspective and they must be sure not to take an adultist stance (Hatfield et al. 2010) and automatically assume that the adults telling reflected how the children experienced the situation.

An additional benefit of interviewing the parent first was that when the parent’s interviews had highlighted specific incidences as exemplars of how the children experienced staying behind, I would endeavour to incorporate these into the children’s interviews. On a number of occasions this gave rise to inconsistencies between parental proxies reports and the children’s accounts, including those examples already discussed in the methodological case for giving children a voice. This added a depth to the data that would not have been possible had I exclusively relied on parental reporting.

The photo elicitation interview is one where photographs are introduced into the interview process (Clark-Ibanez 2004). Photo elicitation is an effective tool used to evoke memories and stimulate discussion (Collier and Collier 1986; Prosser 2011). For my research, the primary driver behind introducing photographs was their potential as an ice breaker, with the capacity to reduce the inherent hierarchical disparity in power (Packard 2008; Prosser 2011), and to facilitate rapport between myself and the children (Clark-Ibanez 2004; Gold 2007).

I chose to introduce two photographs at the beginning of each interview hoping to allow the children to take on the role of the expert and thus reduce the power imbalance (Pauwels 2015). After showing the children the photographs, each which had been selected with guidance from their mother as representative of yachting campaigns they felt their children most identified with the sailor’s global mobility, I did as Pauwels (2015) suggests, and posed open questions to the children to allow them to take the lead. In most instances this was very successful. The majority of the children could immediately identify the yachts that were in the photographs and what they had done during that particular period, whether they had moved overseas, or whether they had stayed behind at home while their father travelled. This regularly prompted quite animated discussion between the children around the best and the worst places they had visited. Whilst these initial discussions often made only a limited contribution to my overall findings, what they did do was break the ice and give the children the confidence to answer subsequent questions. There were a few examples where the introduced photographs did prompt the children to discuss a significant event that ultimately contributed to my findings. For example, one child, when shown a photograph depicting the team her father was currently working with, immediately recounted a recent incident in her life. She had been visiting her father with her mother and sister but when it was time to leave, she did not want to go. In her words:

Once we were all going home from visiting him and then I really wanted to stay … and so Mum called the school and fixed it … and then I flew back by myself.

The photograph immediately took her to a time when she had been able to take control of a situation, the importance of which became evident as my research continued and control emerged as an important element in the children’s adaption to their family situation. The photograph also gave her the opportunity to take control of the interview process and by allowing her to steer the direction of the interview, this reduced the power imbalance, putting us immediately on a more level playing field.

One final point with regard to the selection of images relates to the ethical obligation to protect the emotional welfare of the participating children. Given that innocuous images may stimulate or evoke ‘distorted, unexpected and even painful memories’ (Prosser 2011, 484), I confirmed with the mothers that there was no reason why either of the yachts they had identified should not be included.

Photo elicitation is not the panacea to all the challenges associated with giving children a voice within research (Harper 2002; Packard 2008). However, I found it to be effective in breaking the ice between myself and the child participants, whilst also on occasion provoking surprising and perceptive accounts. While I concur with Pauwels that ‘not all material will have the same “elicitation” potential for all respondents’ (2015, 99), by tailoring the photos to each individual participant, or group of participants, researchers have a tool available to redress at least some of the inherent power imbalance between themselves and their child interviewees.

Avoiding the ethically difficult questions means researchers are also taking a stance to effectively ‘excluding children from research’ (Morrow and Richards 1996, 103). Therefore, I did ask the children some emotionally sensitive questions, such as ‘Is there anything you don’t like so much about Dad travelling for work?’ However, in recognition that rapport is a social process that develops over the course of the interview (Saywitz and Camparo 2013) I raised the least sensitive topics first (Charlesworth and Rodwell 1997) and kept the sensitive questions until the end of the interviews.

Whilst there was a risk that any gatekeepers presence would influence the children’s responses to this type of question (Mayall 2008), to not ask the question would be to revert to an adultist stance and to take away the child’s voice. I found that by waiting until solid rapport had been established, the children appeared willing to answer the more delicate questions. The questions must be asked if the children are to be afforded a true voice, but the timing of the questions warrants reflection.

Non-Malevolence

Finally in terms of harm versus benefit, throughout my entire research project, I was constantly reflecting on the requirement for non-malevolence, and the need to make decisions that adhere to the ‘ethical principle of beneficence’ and ‘that the risk of harm should be the least possible’ (Brinkmann and Kvale 2015, 95). I was constantly watching for the ethically important moments. This meant that on one occasion, I made the decision to decline to interview the children of one family where the parents were experiencing matrimonial difficulties. While the mother provided consent, after I had completed her interview, I did not feel it would be possible to include her children without risking their emotional welfare. I found myself in a position similar to the one Bushin (2007) describes, in that what I perceived to be in the best interests of the children I was researching, was not the same as the parent’s perception. This ethics-in-practice approach (Dorner 2014; Guillemin and Gillam 2004) is one that should be adopted by all researchers when engaging with children, or with adult participants – non-malevolence should be non-negotiable.

I believe that the strategies I adopted in my study collectively served to reduce the inherent power imbalance, minimising the risk of harm to my child participants. Others will need to consider what combination of specific strategies will work for their particular research context.

Privacy and Confidentiality

The privacy and confidentiality of study participants is the fundamental ethical concern of many ethics committees, with a clear procedural focus on how consent is obtained (Guillemin and Gillam 2004). As already discussed, obtaining such consent from child participants requires, among other things, age-appropriate consent forms. From an ethics-in-practice perspective, my contribution to the conversation around privacy and confidentiality, is in terms of the ethically important choices we make around the presence of the gatekeeping guardian.

Presence of a gate keeper

When it comes to giving children a voice the protection of their emotional welfare is non-negotiable. Whilst this is the temporary role of the researcher, it is the life role of the children’s parents, which became increasingly apparent during the course of my research as each of the co-located parents asserted their position as a parental gatekeeper (Mason 2002), and inserted themselves into the interview process. This however does give rise to issues around the privacy afforded the child during the interview and the confidentiality of their accounts. While not discounting that the children may bias their responses to present a ‘happy family’ due to the presence of the mother (Kutrovátz 2017), I argue that when interviews are conducted in an ethically robust manner, the benefits of the gatekeeper outweigh the risks.

In recognition of the parents’ responsibilities towards their children, alongside my ethical obligation of non-malevolence, I always indicated that they were welcome to stay during the interview process. This was a reiteration of the parent’s consent form where I had already confirmed they were ‘welcome to remain in the room if your children are to be interviewed, or simply within earshot if you are comfortable with that’. The majority of the parents, especially those with younger children, chose to sit with the children throughout the interviews. Many of the younger children, particularly in the earlier stages of the interviews, sought reassurance from their mothers as to whether it was okay to answer my questions. I contend that, especially for the younger participants, without the support of their mother, the power imbalance may have proven overwhelming, inhibiting their willingness or ability to actively participate (MacLean and Harden 2014; O’Kane 2008). Furthermore, whilst I advised the children that they could stop the interview at any stage, the presence of their mother provided the ultimate protection of their emotional welfare as reassurances would have been withheld if at any time they perceived I was distressing their child.

The gatekeeping was not restricted to the mothers of the younger children, and the mothers of older sibling groups also often remained within earshot, as evidenced by a number of interruptions from other rooms. One such example was when the following occurred. A teenage participant made the following statement when asked the previously mentioned emotionally sensitive question ‘Is there anything you don’t like so much about Dad travelling for work?’:

I used to try and stay up all night so that I was awake when he would get home … I guess I was sad and missed him so wanted to see him as soon as I could.

At that point the participant, who was 16-years old at the time, became visibly distressed at the memory and her mother immediately came in from the next room where she had clearly been listening. This serves to illustrate that there is no age limit on parental protection of their child’s emotional welfare. It is also worth noting at this point that my reflective post-interview journal notes for this family included the following:

At points in the interview [Female 16] became distressed. I offered to stop the interview on a number of occasions and [Female 16] wanted to continue. I believe she really liked the idea of her experiences being able to help those who may travel this path in the future.

This indicates that she appeared to have adopted the goal of the research, being one of the previously identified aims of the informed consent process.

The presence of the parents also proved to be valuable in other ways. When real-time debates and interactions occurred between the mothers and their children, this served to add significant insight and depth to the subsequent analysis. A number of the parents also commented to me after the interviews how they were pleasantly surprised at how well their children had adapted to the disrupted lifestyle they were leading. This element of reciprocity is another potential benefit of the presence of the parent during the interviews.

The benevolence of the parental gatekeeper does assume a positive relationship, and this may not always be the case. However, my experiences were that once rapport had been established the parent would often indicate if they had a challenging relationship with any of their children. From two mothers:

Her and I still really battle. Meaning we need to do some work. And you’ll see the dynamics, it’s soul destroying.

Her and I don’t get on great, so obviously when [Father] is home, then it becomes them against me.

My choice to interview the parent first allowed me to recognise these ethically important moments and to incorporate this understanding into my subsequent practice. This extends beyond the interview to the later stages of the research project. A reflective journal that I completed immediately post-interviewing, often while sitting in the car outside the participants’ homes, ensured the importance of any disclosures was not forgotten when analysing the data or reporting my findings.

How much of this openness can be attributed to my status as a cultural insider, or was triggered due to the topic under discussion, remains an unknown. What is clear is that there are potential benefits to establishing rapport with the gatekeeper prior to their presence in the subsequent interview. This may reduce their influence if the children observe an open and honest exchange between the gatekeeper and the interviewer, while any disclosures by the parent should be noted and reflected upon throughout the remainder of the project.

I believe researchers inviting children to participate should recognise the omnipresence of the parent as an acceptable constraint on the children’s privacy and confidentiality, one which has a number of attached benefits, and is required in exchange for gaining access to the children. Excluding gatekeepers would have invariably limited my access, despite my insider status, effectively denying children the very right I am arguing for, their right to participate, which would have once again exacerbated the adult-centric imbalance that permeates social research (Fox 2013; Skelton 2008).

Discussion

The unique and sometimes disparate perspectives provided by co-located parents and their children during my research into the impact of contemporary global mobility, form the foundation of my call for scholars to reconsider their adultist approach to HRM research (Hatfield et al. 2010). A methodological preference for excluding stakeholder children despite their potential to make a significant contribution to our empirical and theoretical understanding of work-life balance, parental employment, work-place bullying, and the expatriate experience, restricts the capacity for all family members to contribute to evidence based outcomes (Kossek et al. 2011) including the development of family-friendly policies, which to date remain underwhelming in terms of organisational outcomes (Guest, 2002; Masterson et al. 2021)

Recognizing the need for change leads us to the question of how to conduct ethically robust research interviews with children participants. While the seminal work of Guillemin and Gillam (2004) when combined with research conducted by the Childwatch International Research Network, provides a guiding framework, further resources are still required to support those who accept this challenge (Graham et al. 2015). This paper offers additional practical suggestions for how to obtain informed consent through the use of age-adapted information sheets and supplementary verbal explanations. It details a deliberately timed and managed approach to semi-structured interviews specifically aimed at reducing the inherent power inequalities that exist between adult researchers and child participants (Morrow and Richards 1996). In terms of gatekeeper guardians, while there are those who argue their presence impacts study participants right to privacy and confidentiality, my experience is that their reassurances and emotional support underpin their children’s ability to actively participate (MacLean and Harden 2014; O’Kane, 2008) and therefore they should be invited to stay. The importance of an ethics-in-practice approach (Dorner 2014; Guillemin and Gillam 2004) and recognising, and reacting to, ethically important moments that emerge throughout the research process, is a final key takeaway given that non-malevolence should be non-negotiable.

Limitations and Future Research

Alongside the already acknowledged methodological limitations of the study informing this paper, it is necessary to consider the self-selection of my participants who may not have agreed to their children’s participation if they were concerned about the impact of their partner’s contemporary global mobility on their children’s welfare. In previous publications I have positioned the fact that only one of my adult participants withheld consent for her children to participate, as a positive reflection of my status as a cultural insider. On further reflection this may also have been more indicative of self-selection. How those who take up the challenge of giving children their voice can minimise the impact of parental self-selection on children’s participation requires further investigation.

Future researchers should also consider how we can ensure child participants are able provide a genuinely critical voice and not one that has been subsumed into our, or others, interests and perspectives. Dockett and Perry (2003) note that we as researchers may overlook any views expressed by children that do not align with our own experiences and beliefs. So once again, a prevailing adultist perspective. I would add that if we are to fulfill our role to provide organisations with evidence based HRM guidance, we must ensure we do not ignore evidence provided by affected children that may not be what we perceive the various stakeholders want to hear. While reflective research practices are a good starting point, further consideration of this by future researchers is warranted.

Conclusion

We need to move away from our enduring adultist approach to HRM research, where we continue to rely on adults as proxies for affected stakeholder children. To do this our practice must go beyond the purely procedural as ethical challenges are intensified when interviewing children, and we must be able to respond to ethically important moments as and when they occur. If an informed and reflexive approach is taken when collaborating with child participants, these experts on their own lives will provide us with rich and in-depth data that would be lost had they not been given their own voice. At the conclusion of her children’s interview, the parent who was deliberately obtuse around the length of the traveller’s absence, and who had been gatekeeping from the next room during their interview, commented to me that she did not realise that was how her children felt and she would be changing what she did going forward. My hope is that this paper has convinced the reader of the benefits of addressing the white space around children and organisations in HRM research, and to give voice to the previously unheard children, thus changing what we do going forward.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Joanne Mutter

Joanne Mutter is an emerging academic with previous commercial experience in finance and banking spanning more than a decade. Her early career included periods of frequent international business travel, self-initiated expatriation, and a number of years as a traditional trailing spouse. Since transitioning into academia her research to date has primarily focused on the home lives and careers of the stay-behind families in global mobility. Her research has been published in the International Journal of Human Resource Management, Journal of Global Mobility, and New Zealand Journal of Human Resource Management. Her broader research interests include dual careers on the domestic and global stage, the increasing utilisation of alternative forms of global mobility, the future of hybrid working and career equality. She is also currently co-editing the forthcoming Edward Elgar Research Handbook of Global Families: Implications for Theory and Practice. She is currently on staff at the University of Auckland where she teaches post- graduate organisational behaviour and human resource management.