Accountability through access, authenticity and advocacy when researching with young children

ABSTRACT

Research with children involving their use of digital and mobile technologies either as a methodological tool or in relation to their learning foregrounds emerging ethical issues and practices. This paper explores some of the ethical and practical challenges we faced in studies involving the recruitment of young children as research participants, and where the integrity of these research collaborations was critical. We propose an ethical framework to foreground these challenges that is shaped by a view of children as social actors and experts on their own lives, information and communication technologies as ubiquitous in children’s lives, and ethics as a situated and multifaceted responsibility. This framework has three aspects: access, authenticity and advocacy. We draw on examples from different research projects and use ethically important moments to illustrate how notions of access, authenticity and advocacy can foreground the ethical challenges in teaching–learning research contexts to better consider and offer children greater agency in research collaborations.

KEYWORDS:

• Research ethics
• young children
• anonymity
• confidentiality
• information and communication technology (ICT)
• case study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Bronwen Cowie is Professor and Director of the Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research, the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Bronwen has worked on a number of large national research projects including the Laptops for Teachers Evaluation and the New Zealand Curriculum Implementation Exploratory Studies. She has extensive experience in classroom-based research with years 1–10 teachers and students using interviews, observations, and the collection of student work and video as a data generation tools. Her research interests include the links between assessment for learning and culturally responsive pedagogy, student voice, the use of ICTs in science education and classroom interactions and networked inquiry in science classrooms.

Dr Elaine Khoo is a senior research fellow at the Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research, the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Elaine’s research interests include teaching and learning in ICT-supported learning environments, e-learning/online learning settings with a particular interest in online learning communities, participatory learning cultures and collaborative research contexts. Elaine has been in a number of Ministry of Education-funded research projects associated with online learning, Web 2.0 tools and ICTs across the compulsory schooling sector and tertiary level.

ORCID

Elaine Khoo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4260-4553