Abstract
How do children (aged 6–12 years) understand and make use of a digital tool that is under development? This article builds on an ongoing interdisciplinary research project in which children, social workers (the inventers of this social innovation) and researchers together develop an interactive digital tool (application) to strengthen children’s participation during the planning and process of welfare assessments. Departing from social constructionism, and using a discursive narrative approach with visual ethnography, the aim of the article is to display how the children co-construct the application and contribute with “stories of life situations” by drawing themselves as characters and the places they frequent. The findings show that the children improved the application by suggesting more affordances so that they could better create themselves/others, by discovering bugs, and by showing how it could appeal to children of various ages. The application helped the children to start communicating and bonding when creating themselves in detail, drawing places/characters and describing events associated with them, and sharing small life stories. The application can help children and social workers to connect and facilitate children’s participation by allowing them to focus on their own perspectives when drawing and sharing stories.
Highlights
This article discusses how invited schoolchildren and a researcher co-construct an application designed to increase children’s participation in a child welfare context
Increasing children’s participation in child welfare investigations by introducing a digital tool that they can use in planning and in investigative conversations is essential for their sense of control of and influence in their lives
Including children’s perspectives in child welfare assessments is not new, but developing welfare technologies that help children to express their own perspectives in the planning of the child welfare investigation is
Summary
This article discusses how invited schoolchildren and a researcher co-construct an application designed to increase children’s participation in a child welfare context. Our research objective is to produce a digital application that enables children to take part in the planning of their child welfare service investigations, rather than forming a new tool for therapeutic conversations. This article builds on an ongoing interdisciplinary research project in which social workers have identified a need to develop a digital tool (application) in order to strengthen children’s perspectives and participation in child investigations. Increasing children’s participation in child welfare investigations by introducing a digital tool that they can use in planning and in investigative conversations is essential for their sense of control of and influence in their lives. As yet no digital tools focus on the investigative planning and process of the child welfare assessment
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