Approaches and Creative Research Methods with Children and Youth

Children in many cultures and global contexts are socially constructed as being seen and not heard, or of being out of place and problematic in society. They often have to find a space between the dual and often conflicting roles of incompetence due to their status as still growing up until they become adults and full citizens, alongside adult expectations of their behaviour and that they should constructively contribute to their families and society. This contribution is often both household and financial work in poor parts of the global South and is increasingly evident in all parts of the world in invisible social reproduction where young people care for the sick, disabled, elders and/or siblings. Their contributions mean their views of issues, problems and solutions, and involvement in making change, are important not only in children's and young people's own lives, but for families and communities. But involving children in participatory research throws up a variety of practice issues and dilemmas. The key issues revolve around power, particularly who is making decisions, their attitudes and capacity, and the context where the research is conducted and findings communicated, particularly in terms of perceptions of childhood, and children's and young people's accepted roles and potential for participation.

Children's and young people's participation in various dimensions of research, from being respondents to being researchers themselves, has been increasingly taken up internationally since the last decade of the 20th century. Such research with and by children and youth has been promoted through developments in law and sociology: in implementation of children's rights to participation as part of the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC); and in recognition of children's agency in the sociology of childhood contemporary with the UNCRC (James and Prout, 1990). Activist movements in children's rights throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s led up to these initiatives (Franklin, 1986, 1995). Alongside this ran increased academic interest in young people and children, development of youth services and studies, and subsequently, alongside UNCRC implementation, the development of childhood studies in universities (see Johnson and West, 2018).

Apart from children's right to participate, and academic interest in childhood, children's and young people's participation in research has a practical rationale. First, not listening to, or finding out from children and young people about their lives ‘may have negative consequences', and second, they are experts, ‘uniquely knowledgeable about their own lives’ (Ennew, 2004: 24). There is an adult tendency to assume knowledge of children's lives based on their own perspectives or experience. Children's and young people's views are easily sidelined, as evident in the early 21st century with recognition of childhood sexual and physical abuse ignored across a number of social institutions (Barnett, 2003; Dodd, 2016; Goodstein and Otterman, 2018; Sherwood, 2016, 2018; Taylor, 2016), with severe individual and social consequences, while children's and young people's stated environmental and climate concerns have been publicly denigrated by government ministers (Carrington, 2019).