rehabinkmag Commentary, Issue 15

Childhood Ethics: How Can this New Field of Study Guide Research with Children?

Commentary

By Emily Cox, Kristina Nazzicone-Ferreira, & Gail Teachman 

In this article, we discuss important contributions from Childhood Ethics (1,2), an emerging interdisciplinary field of study that has direct impacts on how researchers design and conduct research with children and youth. We define and discuss key concepts that are central to thinking about childhood ethics and how to do research with instead of on children. We then outline three strategies researchers can use to guide research processes and optimize the rigour, authenticity, and value of their research results.

Children are too often judged as unable to understand their world in the ‘correct’ way. Societal assumptions often frame children as lacking experience and being unable to articulate their views and preferences. Eliciting children’s opinions on research topics that affect their lives has been characterized as challenging, and even unnecessary (3). Yet, there is ample evidence that children as young as four years of age are able to weigh in on matters that concern them and share understandings of what they think is ‘right’ or ‘good’ (3).

The importance of eliciting children’s views was recognized with the 1989 signing of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child; this sparked questions regarding taken-for-granted social assumptions about children’s capacity and agency (4). Although an increased recognition of the rights of children followed, research was slow to shift away from viewing children primarily as future adults (5). Children’s voices were ‘captured’ in research with a focus on authenticity or verbatim sharing of their utterances. Still, these shifts failed to adequately account for the agency of children, as well as the complexity of their inner worlds. ‘New Social Studies of Childhood’ has since emerged with an intent to study children in their own right, or as independent subjects worthy of research ‘as they are’ (6,7). As a result, there was an increase in child representation in qualitative research (5).

In 2015, the field of Childhood Ethics emerged to address some recognized gaps in child-focused research by utilizing interdisciplinary methodologies to study everyday ethics in children’s lives, their agency, and best interests (1). Childhood Ethics is an interdisciplinary field of study centered on promoting children’s agency and drawing on more nuanced and inclusive conceptions of child voice through an ethics lens (2). Childhood Ethics has since been taken up in health and rehabilitation focused research to weigh in on ethical concerns implicated in a wide range of healthcare practices (8-11). This field of study can help researchers become more attuned to the importance of considering how over-simplified terms such as ‘child voice’ can unintentionally limit the diversity and richness that exists across children’s experiences and views concerning their own health and health-related decisions (8-11).

Researchers should be critically reflexive in how they represent the views of child research participants. The expression ‘giving voice to children’ is commonly used in child-focused research (10,11). Although well-intentioned, this phrase suggests that children cannot speak for themselves, discounts the role of the researcher as the interpreter of data contributed by children, excludes those who communicate in ways other than verbal speech, and perpetuates a power dynamic between adults and children, with adults framed as gatekeepers of children’s knowledge (10).

Children running.
Rene Bernal (Unsplash). A group of children and a dog running in a line down an hill. The sun is setting and the sky is shades of purple, yellow, orange, and red.

Overview of concepts relevant to Childhood Ethics

In this section, we highlight the foundational concepts of childhood agency, autonomy, and thin vs. thick conceptions of voice because these concepts are key to thinking about how to represent children’s contributions to research.

Concept #1: Childhood Agency

The term ‘childhood agency’ is relatively well established and is central to the field of Childhood Ethics (12). Prout and James (13), two pioneers in the field of Childhood Studies, explained that agency is concerned with the ways “children are and must be seen as active in the construction and determination of their own social lives” (p8). They contribute actively to shaping their reality by forming their own opinions, knowledge, and preferences.

Concept #2: Autonomy

Autonomy, often conflated with agency, refers to the ability of a person to make self-determining choices (14). Conventions in research have idealized the notion of participants as separate, autonomous individuals whose views are somehow distinctly their own. These conventions further contribute to marginalizing the perspectives of children and young people because they are seen as lacking autonomy. However, for all persons, regardless of their age, it has been argued that complete autonomy is an illusion. Relational views of autonomy acknowledge that society is structured in ways that connect people through shared languages, sets of values, expectations, and norms (15,16).

Concept #3: Thin vs. thick conceptions of voice

Differentiating between a ‘thin’ vs. ‘thick’ conception of voice can help reconceptualize the ways researchers think about ‘voice’ in research with children. Most child-focused research arguably employs a ‘thin’ understanding of child voice, which focuses on the objective vocalizations and utterances of children; judged by others in relation to their coherence with the social world within which they are expressed (17). A ‘thin’ conception of voice can be understood as an expectation that a young person will communicate in a way that is deemed appropriate and ideal according to adult standards (10). Inadvertently then, children’s perspectives and ways of communicating might be silenced through research standards that idealize coherent verbal speech over forms of communication that are judged as incoherent and immature.

Adopting a ‘thick’ conception of child voice resists the assumption that there is a single correct or meaningful way of communicating with children (17). ‘Thick’ conceptions of child voice create space for diverse ways of communicating that go beyond verbal speech and advanced language skills, without discounting the value of spoken words. For instance, scholars have emphasized how instances of silence, similar to speech, can be considered performative and just as imbued with meaning as uttered speech (18). Furthermore, arts-based elicitation methods such as digital storytelling can help elucidate perspectives that might be suppressed by ideals in academic research which uphold particular notions of who makes a ‘good’ or ‘ideal’ research participant. (19).

How researchers can think about child-focused research differently

  1. Think critically about methods, data, and analysis practices

The reframing of child voices within research requires critical reflection at all stages of the research process, including question formation, data generation, analysis, and writing. It is important for researchers to account for the context which shapes their research process and results (10) to ensure they are not reproducing oversimplified notions of child voice. No matter the approach to research, the way in which child voice is conceptualized will have methodological implications. As such, it is important to be transparent in the ways that children’s perspectives are being represented and to acknowledge the role of the researcher as an interpreter who aims to foreground children’s views.

  1. Ongoing researcher reflexivity

Reflexivity calls for individuals to think critically about their social worlds, inviting them to ‘make the familiar strange’, and reflect on the origins of deeply ingrained beliefs (20,21). As it relates to research with children, reflexivity can be used to surface and unpack beliefs about children as a social group. Not only does this process bring taken-for-granted assumptions to the fore; it also strengthens researchers’ interpretation of research data. Some questions to consider when engaging in reflexivity are: 1) What are your current beliefs about children and their role in society? 2) What are your beliefs about children’s perspectives and opinions? 3) What can children know and express, and what are the limits of their knowledge in relation to your research topic? 4) Are children’s ways of knowing valued, or not, in your social sphere? 5) What unintentional beliefs might you hold with regard to this group? All of these questions can and should be followed up with asking “Why” questions. Why has this belief come about? What forces, either real (e.g., laws) or invisible (e.g., social norms), act to perpetuate these ways of thinking about children?

  1. Meaningful collaboration and participatory research with children

Engaging children in participatory research requires the facilitation of meaningful engagement in decision-making throughout the research process. The more recent push to include children as co-constructors of research – that is, as more active participants in all research processes – is reflective of a broader recognition of child agency and their capacity to meaningfully contribute to both the research process and outputs (22). A common concern relating to participatory research is the potential for tokenism: where children are engaged at a limited and superficial level rather than meaningfully (11). The term ‘tokenism’ is associated with instances where children’s views have been elicited but not given due weight (23). Researchers engaged in work with children should account for this concern, ensuring children are involved in all stages of the research process where feasible. Further, even in participatory research, the greater power and control held by adults compared to children has been identified as a key ethical concern (22). Instead of attempting to rectify this enduring power imbalance, researchers must instead make every effort to acknowledge and decrease its effects. By explicitly speaking with children about this power imbalance, researchers can promote more informed child engagement in the research process (22).

We trust that this brief article will prompt reflection on the importance of considering children’s agency and the value of their contributions to knowledge when designing and consuming research that will have direct implications for children. In our view, such reflection is needed and valuable beyond the sphere of research, extending across areas of society. If you are interested in learning more, we encourage you to explore the resources available through the Childhood Ethics project called VOICE, hosted at McGill University (https://www.mcgill.ca/voice/) and the literature cited below.

Children sitting on grass.
Charlein Gracia (Unsplash). Three girls sit beside each other on grass. One child is looking down at the open palms of her hands.

Acknowledgements

Featured illustration by Catherine George for rehabINK.

To refer to this article, it can be cited as:

Cox E, Nazzicone-Ferreira K, Teachman G. Childhood Ethics: How can this new field of study guide research with children?. 2023:15. Available from: https://rehabinkmag.com

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