Building Capacity for Ethical Research with Children & Young People
A Childwatch thematic group was approved in 2010 to undertake an international scoping project entitled, Building Capacity for Ethical Research with Children & Young People. This has arisen out of Childwatch’s commitment to encouraging ethical research practices through the provision of up-to-date information, training and resources to help Key Institutions (KIs) undertake high-quality, effective and creative research studies with children.
This thematic group has been established to:
- Identify the ethical issues and challenges in undertaking research with and for children in different majority and minority world contexts; and
- Identify and collate existing ethics guidelines and resources in use in different countries that could potentially be translated, analysed and disseminated amongst researchers in the CWI network - and beyond – as a way of promoting the conduct of ethical, respectful research in different cultural and social contexts.
The KIs leading this project are from Australia, New Zealand and Scotland, although the survey has also been developed in consultation with KIs in Nigeria, Jordan, South Africa and Colombia.
2010 Survey
The first initiative was to undertake an international scoping project entitled Building Capacity for Ethical Research with Children and Young People. This project aimed to identify the ethical issues and challenges in undertaking research with and for children and young people in different majority and minority world contexts; and to identify and collate existing ethics guidelines and resources. It was anticipated that the findings would extend existing knowledge and provide information and resources that could usefully contribute to promoting the conduct of ethical, respectful research in different cultural and social contexts. To the best of our knowledge it is the first international project of its kind to identify and explore the ethical issues facing researchers, in a range of contexts, when undertaking research with children, particularly in relation to participatory research with children.
Download the report: Powell, M.A., Graham, A., Taylor, N., Newell, S., & Fitzgerald, R.: Building Capacity for Ethical Research with Children and Young People: An International Research Project to Examine the Ethical Issues and Challenges in Undertaking Research with and for Children in Different Majority and Minority World Contexts.(Research Report for the Childwatch International Research Network). Dunedin: University of Otago Centre for Research on Children and Families / Lismore: Centre for Children and Young People.
2011 Literature Review
A follow up of this study was to review the current literature regarding ethical issues in research with children and young people. Child research ethics is a topic that has seen a significant growth in interest over recent years, in response to developments in both child research and ethics (Alderson & Morrow, 2011; Hill, 2005; Farrell, 2005), and consequently there is a large body of literature related to this. The burgeoning interest is clearly apparent in a preliminary search of the literature using the key words children, research and ethics, which revealed between 1,900 and 11,000 journal articles in four article database search engines. The focus of this review is ethical issues in relation to undertaking research with children and young people. Clavering and McLaughlin’s (2010) recent comprehensive literature review examined the ways in which children have been engaged in health-related research practices, and found that the three approaches used were best summarised as research on children, with children and by children.
Download the literature review: Powell, M.A. (2011, June). International Literature Review: Ethical Issues in Undertaking Research with Children and Young People. Lismore: Southern Cross University, Centre for Children and Young People / Dunedin: University of Otago, Centre for Research on Children and Families
Involved Key Institutions:
Centre for Children & Young People (CCYP), Southern Cross University, Lismore, Australia (Anne Graham, Robyn Fitzgerald, Renata Phelps)
Centre for Research on Children and Families (CRCF), University of Otago, New Zealand (Nicola Taylor)
Social Justice and Social Change Research Centre (SJSC), University of Western Sydney, Australia (Jan Mason, Jan Falloon, Natalie Bolzan)
UHI Centre for Rural Childhood, Perth College University of the Highlands Millennium Institute, United Kingdom (Rebecca Wallace)
