Doing Research with Children and Young People

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 15 No. 1 (2005) ISSN: 1546-2250 Doing Research with Children and Young People Fraser, Sandy and Lewis, Vicky and Ding, Sharon (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 defineDoing 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 373 groups and the challenges they face, including chapters on earlyand 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. 374 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...