Doing Research With Children: Making Choices on Ethics and Methodology That Encourage Children’s Participation

Abstract

This paper sits in the broader context of doing research with children and relates to issues of children’s participation in research and the importance of respecting children’s rights. Children’s participation and active involvement in research have been extensively discussed and debated by authors in the childhood studies field. It is argued that children should be able to contribute to the decision-making process (Powell & Smith, 2009) and that researchers should value children’s roles in research (Scheffel, 2009) and research for and with children (Gallacher, Gallagher, & Keynes, 2008). This paper contributes to these debates by describing how children were encouraged to be actively involved in the data generation process in an ethnographic research project that aimed to identify different perspectives on creativity in Scottish primary1 education. This paper also relates to debates on ways of doing research with children, in terms of both ethical challenges and methodological choices, as mentioned below.