Abstract
Although children and young people in schools should be asked for their informed consent to participate in research, they rarely have a say in what research takes place in their school. We draw upon debates about youth participation in research to explore young people's preferences about their involvement in research and how they want to be treated by researchers. To do so, we reflect on the process of co-creating a guide for involving young people in social research with a Student Research Committee and their teacher; this involved group discussions, ranking exercises and other interactive sessions that generated ideas about the preferences of the young people about participating in research. Overall, the involvement of young people in all stages of the research process will enhance what they get out of participating and the extent to which they feel their voices have been heard.
Highlights
This commentary reflects on the process of creating a youth-centred research guide with a class of 15–16-year olds who attend a diverse research-rich multicultural secondary school in inner-city Glasgow
The school is research-rich in that many researchers approach the school to request that they undertake research and many of the students have been involved in research projects on a diverse range of topics
122 Peter Hopkins, Cath Sinclair and the Shawlands Academy Student Research Committee involved a research team working on a project about faith, ethnicity and place for young people (Botterill et al, 2016; Hopkins et al, 2015), which included a series of focus groups and interviews in the school with young people from diverse ethnic and religious minority backgrounds
Summary
This commentary reflects on the process of creating a youth-centred research guide with a class of 15–16-year olds who attend a diverse research-rich multicultural secondary school in inner-city Glasgow. All students participated in one focus-group discussion (there were four discussions in total) in loosely defined friendship groups to explore the issues above in more depth as appropriate From these exercises and discussions, five key themes were developed: (1) why research is important, (2) how we want to be treated, (3) how the research should be conducted, (4) how researchers should behave and (5) topics we think are important. Feedback was an important topic of discussion; the students agreed that having participated in a project, some form of written feedback is necessary Some claimed they would be content with one line of feedback or clarification about whether or not the research worked, whereas others felt that more detailed feedback was necessary. Following on from these presentations, Glasgow City Council have incorporated the guide into their process of granting access to researchers and a copy of it is available on their website
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