Doing Research with Children and Young People
Fraser, Sandy and Lewis, Vicky and Ding, Sharon (eds.) et al. (2004).
London: Sage Publications; 294 pages. $39.95. ISBN 0761943811.
Scholars of children, youth, and environments have often noted that creating child-friendly communities makes places better for everyone to live in. This book’s hidden message could be parallel to this: by paying critical attention to how we do research with children and youth, we gain insights into the best practices for all social research. Indeed, this edited volume aims high, targeting academics and practitioners of youth-related and childhood research through covering the sticky issues of ethics and consent, power and marginalization, dissemination of results and representation, and the positions of the researcher and researched.
This volume has a companion, The Reality of Research with Children and Young People (London: Sage 2004), which contains 13 accounts of research projects and reflections on them, by many of the same authors found in Doing Research. The current collection was designed in conjunction with a course at Open University in England, which explains its primarily British context. The editors explicitly define Doing Research with Children and Young People not as a “how-to” book, but rather, as a set of reflections on issues arising in research with youth.
The book is organized into four sections. The first, “Setting the Context,” covers the state of current thought in critical childhood studies by covering issues of situating empirical research, images of childhood through history and across cultures, the legal context of childhood (admittedly focused primarily on Britain), and more abstract, theoretical engagements of paradigms and philosophy, covering “scientific,” structuralist, and post-structuralist approaches. The second section, “Research Relations,” weaves together issues of power, ethics, gender, and involving children and young people as researchers. The third section, “Diversity,” explores the multiple perspectives that engage researchers working with different social groups and the challenges they face, including chapters on early- and middle-childhood, young people, disabilities, participatory action research in “the majority world,” and race and ethnicity. The final section, “Relevance, Evaluation, and Dissemination,” showcases three vignettes of research applications in particular settings: health and social care, education, and childhood studies.
The central themes of the book can be summed up in three points: 1) research outcomes are influenced by the theoretical and methodological approaches taken from the start; 2) power relations affect research; and 3) there has been a (welcome) shift toward more participatory research strategies, which have spurred new considerations, methods, and guidelines for working with youth. The final point is in many ways the substantive launching point for the individual chapters: authors review research design and methods issues, strategies for working with children and young people in research situations, and points regarding sharing results, all through the lens of maximizing participatory engagement of youth and minimizing adult-centered frames of reference.
Each chapter manages to dip into all or most of these themes. Thanks to clear, concise writing and solid editing, many of the chapters offer a bit of everything: a briefing on theory, some empirical examples, ideas on methods, and a lot of reflection on what worked and what didn’t for the authors, both theoretically and methodologically. However, the 18 chapters do not follow one template—some are more abstract and some are more practical, depending on the topic and approach. For example, the chapters in the middle two sections typically begin with just enough theory to locate the research—for those familiar with the work of Foucault, Giddens, Piaget, or Oakley this is a helpful reference point, and for those unfamiliar with the groundwork, it is just enough to help understand the connections the author is making between theory and practice of child-centered research. Given the book’s purpose of crossing disciplinary boundaries, this tactic is quite effective as it refrains from over-simplification on one hand and obfuscating jargon on the other.
Several points emerge that are worth highlighting. First, a thread through much of the work here has to do with navigating the position and meaning of “researcher” in work with children and young people, especially regarding issues of informed consent and “opting in” to research, levels of participation by children/youth in the research, and various ways of stepping out of the long shadow of adult authority. Second, several of the chapters—especially those concerned with forces of social stratification and marginalization—identify the need to “deconstruct dichotomies” (Robinson and Kellet, p. 93) such as rural/urban, or public/private. While this has been a goal of feminist and post-structuralist thought, the authors in this volume make important contributions to the project as they recount engagements with children and young people who are multiply marginalized by their social and physical locations, gender, dis/ability, sexuality, and—of course—stage in the life-course. However, throughout the book the editors use a dichotomy of their own when referring to the minority/majority world. This construct is never defined although it is implied that Britain and by extension Europe, North America, etc. (and, indeed, the reader) are part of the minority world. It suggests that we can lump vast areas of the globe together based on one characteristic, and also ignores the diversity of the very researchers who may be reading and using the book.
We would have appreciated more discussion of the often-ignored reality of negotiating research arrangements with the institutions children are subject to (schools, after-school programs, etc.), many of which have little time or interest in devoting attention to research projects that they see as peripheral to their goals at best, and a distraction at worst. For example, our situation of working with 6- to 12-year old children at an after-school program in an ethnically diverse low-income neighborhood has been beneficial in one sense—the staff and administration are grateful for some extra adults and art supplies, and generally have an “open-door” policy for researchers from the local university, which gives us a lot of freedom and time—but also frustrating in other senses—high staff turnover, rigid disciplinary tactics, inappropriate staff behavior, and a completely non child-centered, non-participatory atmosphere—have made our efforts more difficult.
While the volume Doing Research with Children and Young People overall is excellent, we would have liked to see fewer overlapping authorships of chapters by the editors; most of them were co-authors in at least two of the chapters. Similarly, nearly all the authors are at British universities, which somewhat thwarts their attempts at international perspectives; further, the authors are mainly drawn from education, health, and childhood studies disciplines, which tempers the claims to interdisciplinarity. That said, however, those of us coming to children’s perspectives from other areas of study are grateful that such lively, thorough, and valuable texts are being produced.
Reviewer Information
Department of Geography
State University of New York – University at Buffalo
Megan Cope received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1995. She is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the State University of New York at Buffalo where she teaches courses in urban social geography, social theory, and qualitative methods. She directs a project called Children’s Urban Geographies, which involves university students learning to do research with children at an after-school program around issues of urban space and “child-friendly cities.”
Department of Geography
State University of New York – University at Buffalo
Frank Latcham is a Social Worker (MSW, 1999 California State University, San Jose) and a graduate student in the Geography Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo focusing on children’s urban geography, qualitative research and the uses of Geographic Information Systems in these endeavors.