The Ethics of Unlocking Research with Children: Creativity, Agency and Change

It is recognised by researchers that children’s voices must be included in shaping knowledge and understanding of social life. However, a consistent barrier to co-produced or participatory research is ethical decision making, impacting the type and nature of research that is granted approval. If we are to respond to the UNs Sustainable Development Goals, which demands a unity of purpose, children’s voices must be enabled and ensuring effective ethical frameworks to enable research with children is critical. Advances have been made to the role children play in research. However, there is a tension between the creativity that informs efforts to allow children to participate and rigid and limiting models and frameworks for ethical oversight. This edited collection takes on an underrepresented topic by investigating the ethical considerations that impact on what research is or is not approved, through chapters that look at competence, consent, methodologies, safeguarding, assessment, and meaningful participation. Exploring the extent to which ‘ethical’ decision making has become limited by institutional understandings of children as ‘objects’, or at best ‘subjects’, within a research process, this collection invites us to start to reimagine a process in which child centred practices are at the centre of encouraging a more fluid and relational method of managing risks and vulnerabilities. The Ethics of Unlocking Research with Children seeks to understand the challenges and offers solutions to maximise research opportunities with children.