Introduction
Three sequential phases are
commonly identified in the history of researching children, and research
from all phases continues to be conducted today. Initial endeavors
focused on researching about children were strongly influenced by
developmental theories, and used predominantly quantitative methods. In
the second phase, following the development of the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989 and the emergence
of childhood studies in the early 1990s, and informed by feminist and
postmodern theories, many researchers turned to engaging children more
directly. Researchers focused on researching with children and utilized a
wide range of data-generating methods with the aspiration they would
‘give’ children agency and autonomy, and more authentically represent
their ‘voice.’ Participatory methods in particular were seen as a way to
attenuate the power relations between researchers and children. In the
third and current phase, there has been a call to recognize that
children live their lives in relationships with adults and peers and
conceptions of the child as predominantly agentic, autonomous, and
independent have been critiqued. The influence of Indigenous worldviews
and posthumanist theories have strengthened the call for research that
recognizes that children’s lives take shape through their relational
encounters and entanglement with humans (intra- and
inter-generationally) and more-than-humans, including animals, plants,
material artifacts, and technology. Indigenous research in particular
has powerfully shown that children’s lives are mediated by the
worldviews and practices of their cultures. These latest developments
have led to some arguing it is time to decenter abstract conceptions of
the child and childhood; research involving children needs to be
conceptualized and conducted in a way that identifies the practices that
enact categories of the child and childhood in particular places in
time and space. Hence a more encompassing form of ‘researcher
reflexivity’ is foregrounded in this third phase: a reflexivity looking
to move beyond the positionality of the researcher and bias and
interrogate how the embodied researcher—with their emotions, ontological
assumptions, cultural values, theoretical frameworks, and research
tools—shapes and constrains both the research process and the knowledge
that is produced with children as ‘children’s voice.’ Alongside these
methodological concerns, researchers continue to refine and critique
methods of data generation and analysis, encouraging more transparency,
and interrogating the contribution of methods to research integrity. The
scholarship reviewed in this article focuses on examples of research
and debates from phases two and three.
General Overview
As
the field has continued to mature and critical and more expansive
understandings of relationality have emerged to include all entities
(e.g., Malone, et al. 2020),
key tenets such as the participation of singular, agentic children and
‘giving voice to children’s voices’ have been more critically debated. Horgan, et al. 2017 and Ergler 2017 argue for a more dynamic relational model of participation. Malone, et al. 2020
advocates for research that recognizes children’s lives are deeply
embedded in more-than-human relations and in a context of a transforming
unpredictable unsustainable future. Jenkin, et al. 2020,
foregrounding intersectionality, works to find culturally appropriate
ways for children with disabilities and living in the Global South to
participate in research. Researcher reflexivity has been subject to
increasingly critical appraisal; while it continues to have prominence
it has not been clear what it looks like in practice. Blaisdell 2015 and Kontovourki and Theodoru 2018
make transparent the way their researcher positioning and the
structures and processes of their research contribute to the knowledge
produced and how children’s voices are represented. Ethical dimensions
of research have also received critical attention. For example, The
Ethical Research Involving Children (ERIC) project, an international
collaboration aimed at strengthening ethical practices throughout each
stage of the research process, has proposed an ethical framework
involving ‘Three R’s’: Rights, Relationships and Reflexivity (Truscott, et al. 2019).
Furthermore, there is an increasing focus on the way in which
institutional ethical guidelines developed from Western thought
privilege Western values and principles and ways of interacting, and
ignore those of the Global South. Flewitt 2019
argues that institutional ethical review processes and codes are
culturally bound and hence not responsive to particular social contexts.
Abebe and Bessell 2014 and Jenkin, et al. 2020,
researching in the Global South, illustrate ways in which formal ethics
and local ethos and ways of being can both be respected and negotiated.
In addition to these debates, researchers are deepening critiques of
specific methods and their relationship with methodologies. Heydon, et al. 2016
critiques the possibilities and problematics of visual methods, and
argues for the need to examine the relationship between the visual
methods used and the methodological aspects of research. Flewitt 2019
opens up issues that emerge when researchers engage with online and
offline digital tools when researching with young children. These lines
of critique argue for the need for research that is critical, reflexive,
and built from dialogical relationships between those involved.