Child Care Institutions (CCIs) in India form an essential part of the child protection system, providing care, education, and rehabilitation for children in need of care and protection. Yet research on CCIs remains dominated by administrative audits, quantitative indicators, and policy evaluations. What is missing is a multi-layered, interpretive, and contextually grounded understanding of institutional life. This paper presents a comprehensive 14-Point Interpretive Case Study Framework for studying CCIs qualitatively. Drawing from ethnography, institutional ethnography, sociocultural theory, ecological systems theory, trauma-informed approaches, and contemporary rehabilitation discourse, the framework offers researchers a structured yet flexible tool for producing thick, theoretically rich case studies. Each of the fourteen components, ranging from spatial setting and daily rhythms to peer dynamics, agency, and reintegration pathways, is explicated in relation to existing scholarship and Indian child protection contexts. The paper argues that this integrated framework addresses critical gaps in Indian social science literature by enabling researchers to conceptualise CCIs not merely as administrative entities but as lived spaces where childhoods are renegotiated under conditions of vulnerability, discipline, and care. The framework has methodological, theoretical, and policy significance for advancing child-centred research and supporting reforms in institutional care.

Validity and reliability study of the Turkish version of the children's comfort daisies and comfort behaviors checklist.

Background/Objectives: Qualitative child-centered research on pediatric obesity treatment and body image remains limited. This study aimed to explore children’s and adolescents’ experiences with hospital-based obesity treatment and how these experiences relate to body image. Methods: A full-day workshop including three main participatory tasks was conducted in two groups of children (9–13 years) and adolescents (14–18 years), focusing on their experiences with obesity treatment and body image. Data were audiotaped, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results: Four main themes emerged, reflecting different aspects of participants’ experiences. The first theme, Talk with me and not my parents, encompassed participants’ desire for greater agency, as children described lacking information and feeling excluded from consultations. The second theme, Experiences of communication with healthcare professionals (HCPs) about obesity, concerned participants’ perceptions of trust, support, and non-judgmental communication, with some adolescents expressing a need for additional psychological support. The third theme, Internalization of lifestyle advice, indicated that healthy diet was viewed as the primary focus of obesity treatment, while physical activity received less attention. The final theme, Perceptions of the body, conveyed mixed experiences with weighing and most participants perceived weight loss as success in treatment and weight gain as failure. The participants shared experiences of weight-based bullying, perceived stigma, and challenges with maintaining a positive body image in a society with stereotypical thin and muscular body ideals. Conclusions: Body image was influenced by HCPs’ emphasis on health and body size, and by their own internalized perceptions, influenced by societal ideals and experiences of stigma.

ABSTRACT Centring children in play research is fundamental for both children and researchers. It also offers the opportunity to gain important insights that would otherwise remain hidden from view for other beneficiaries of research, such as practitioners, service providers, and policy makers. This paper highlights three projects led by the PEDAL Research Centre over its first decade, all of which incorporate child-centred design, data collection, or co-production. The ChiRPP project investigates peer play and social development in early and middle childhood; the Healthy Start Happy Start study evaluates a playful parent–child intervention to reduce challenging behaviour in early childhood; and Children on the Move explores how young children reclaim and reshape spaces for play. While PEDAL has contributed to innovative and child-centred research methods over the last decade, there are many areas for future learning and some challenges to overcome. PEDAL continues our commitment to ensuring that children are meaningfully centred in play research.

Research involving children and youth, particularly those from culturally sensitive and vulnerable backgrounds, presents intricate ethical, methodological, and epistemological challenges. While acknowledging parents’ legitimate protective role, unjustified parental gatekeeping often regulates access to minors’ participation and can create tensions between adult-centric authority and minors’ evolving capacity for agency. These ambiguities get further obscured when minors’ self-identified experiences and fluid identities—especially in multilingual and culturally diverse contexts—diverge from parental assumptions or hegemonic discourses surrounding identity and autonomy. In this paper, I critically interrogate these tensions, foreground the limitations of procedural ethics when faced with emergent obstacles, and advocate for adaptive, participant-centered frameworks rooted in dialogic engagement. Drawing on three research projects that I conducted in Canada, I demonstrate how child-engaging, multimodal methodologies can facilitate semiosis and empower minors to articulate their lived realities while safeguarding their emotional safety and agency. In this regard, intersectional reflexivity emerges as a constitutive and vital framework, allowing me to address power asymmetries and ethical dilemmas with situational responsivity. This paper reconceptualizes consent as an iterative and relational process rather than a static obligation by foregrounding minors’ narratives and respecting their welfare. Ultimately, the study contributes to advancing ethically robust and transformative research practices that amplify marginalized voices, dismantle systemic inequities, foster nuanced, inclusive engagements with vulnerable participants, and challenge dominant epistemological hierarchies and centering minors’ perspectives as constitutive of broader social discourse.

Catholic theologians have called for a more robust theology of childhood and children in light of global clergy sexual abuse. While affirming the need to develop more substantive theological reflection about children, I express concern that Catholic thought on this topic has been adultist, solely reflecting adults’ perspectives and concerns to the detriment of children. To relate to children justly and engage in theological scholarship that fosters a child-safe culture, theologians must undergo a conversion to a childist orientation and methodology. This article examines how Karl Rahner’s theology reflects adultist aspects common to the broader Christian tradition but also offers positive resources for inspiring conversion. Drawing on Rahner’s theology, Margaret Farley’s account of justice, and my child-centered research, I offer preliminary ideas on the features and benefits of a childist orientation in theology.

Evaluation of Child-centered Research Methods From a Researcher's Perspective: An Investigation of Activity Diaries

This paper examines two virtual child simulators, BabyX and the virtual reality (VR) Baby Training Tool, which serve as immersive and interactive platforms for child-centered research and training. These technologies help overcome key ethical and practical constraints, enabling the controlled study of caregiver-infant interactions and the cultivation of professional relational skills with young children. We analyze the design, functionalities, and current applications of these tools, as well as their potential future developments, highlighting their capacity to advance empirical research and enhance training methodologies in child-focused disciplines.

A child-centred research checklist to improve the design and reporting of paediatric research studies: A descriptive mixed methods study

I argue that participatory action research (PAR) is a valuable means by which to advance citizen social science, not by researching with and on adults, but with children and young people (CYP). Given the right opportunities, using child-friendly and child-centred research methods, CYP can be credible, competent contributors to social science, including the digital environment. The foundational goals of PAR are empowerment, transformation, and enfranchisement of the traditionally marginalised, and none are more universally and structurally marginalised than CYP. Using a child rights argument, I explain why CYP continue to be excluded from research and why there is still so much scepticism that CYP are credible contributors. One reason is childism, a system of oppression, prejudice, and discrimination against CYP on account of their perceived status as not yet human and not fully rational beings. Childism entails the belief that adults are automatically superior to children. I argue further that CYP’s participation in postdigital social science research enacts the entitlements in Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), even though state parties, having ratified this landmark convention, find it very challenging to do more than simply laud its aims. Using three case studies of CYP’s contribution to research and human rights activism, I make the case that they are expert knowers of their own social and digital experiences and have the skills and insights to examine their social worlds in ways that adult researchers too easily overlook, downplay, or simply ignore. As importantly is that CYP are expert users of digital and social media. Their epistemic and ontological experiences as users, creators, contributors, and disseminators of content, and as targets of malign actors, must be included in any research, policy, or law.

The concept of childhood has evolved over the years, inspired by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, shifting from developmental models to a conception of childhood that recognizes children as moral agents. This evolution highlights the importance of respecting children's agency and their right to be heard in matters that are related to them. In conventional health research, however, children's voices are often inadequately accessed. In this commentary, we discuss the imperative to recognize children's agency in dental research and a shift from research on children to research with and by children. Moreover, we underscore the importance of actively seeking and listening to children's voices and recognizing their agency in shaping research and healthcare practices in the field of dentistry. Further, we explore the application of participatory research approaches in dental research and provide examples of studies that have involved children in various capacities. We conclude this commentary by emphasizing the potential benefits of participatory research in both qualitative and quantitative dental studies to promote deeper understanding, clearer communication, and stronger advocacy regarding children's interests. Primarily, we call for greater recognition of children's agency in dental research and advocate for more inclusive and child-centred research methodologies.

Children of immigrants are the fastest-growing segment of the US child population. The complex and nuanced manner in which immigrant children's lives are shaped by issues of legal status, citizenship, state-sanctioned violence and belonging should be of great interest to educators, policymakers and researchers in the US and across the world. However, little attention is given in literature to impact of specific immigration policies on young people's development and socialisation. Perhaps that's because it's a time expensive task and one that requires a deep understanding of child-centred research. Into this gap steps Silvia Rodriguez Vega with her new book, Drawing Deportation. Built on 10 years of work with immigrant children in Arizona and California, she analysed 300 drawings, theatre performances and family interviews to engage with accounts of children's challenges with deportation and family separation during the Obama and Trump administrations. Through children's drawings and stories Rodriguez Vega exposes the destructive consequences of legal violence, structural racism and lack of safety in these young people's lives. Even though they may have been born in the US or may have US citizenship, they still feel endangered if they have one undocumented parent whose status dictates the way family can live their lives. A young participant in the study, Sergio ‘states that in Arizona, just looking Mexican is enough reason to be arrested and detained or deported via racial profiling’ (p. 75). On holidays and special occasions, immigrant families often stay home because they can be easily pulled over for a routine check at alcohol checkpoints, which can then lead to interrogation about status and potential deportation. The artwork shows that children are highly aware of this risk. The book includes multiple examples of what sociologist Nira Yuval-Davis (2011) called ‘everyday bordering and politics of belonging’. The ‘technologies of everyday bordering’ are in place to supposedly ‘make people feel safe by keeping those who do not belong out’ (Yuval-Davis et al., 2018, p. 230). Drawing by a participant in the study, Sandra from Arizona (figure 3.4 in the book) shows an acute representation of the border by a young person. A short dialogue between the two characters is depicted in two word-bubbles. As ‘an authority’ character points to the border, the smaller character says, “But I'm a citizen”; the authority replies, “you look Mexican.” Sandra underlined the words “citizen” and “look” in red. ‘Linking these words communicates the difference between being a citizen and looking like one’ explains Rodriguez Vega (p. 80). In my view, the drawing also shows the omnipotence of de- and re-bordering that involve displacement, relocation of borders and border controls, influence these young people's everyday lives by challenging their sense of belonging, disabling their feeling of safety and raising their sense of precarity. Further, Rodriguez Vega argues that children understand and internalise violence, racism, hate and death and may mirror back what they experience in their lives. In the environment marked by destruction and dehumanisation, violence becomes cyclical and children can become powerful messengers and reproducers of hate. But she counters this possibility by showing children as agents of their own stories who reimagine destructive situations in ways that adults sometimes cannot, offering us alternatives and hope for a better future. In her work, she is clearly inspired by notable educators such as Paulo Freire, to demonstrate how art can be a healing praxis ‘for children to calm their fears and explore positive solutions’ (p. 117). Her book results in an explicit message to transform schooling and teacher's training in super-diverse societies such as the US or the UK where more non-traditional, art-based methods of teaching, civic education, social-justice-oriented learning and culturally relevant curricula are needed. My final point from across the Atlantic is to observe growing research that conveys experiences of migrant children and youth in contexts of the Global South and North, which is increasingly published by international journals in the field demonstrating that these young people's views are becoming recognised as relevant to mainstream academic developments. Connecting to the large volume of scholarship that exists in the interdisciplinary area of migrant childhood and youth studies beyond the United States would have made Rodriguez Vega's contribution more universal and recognisable as it is a fascinating, timely and beautifully written book that speaks beyond its context.

ABSTRACT Ethnographic note-taking in the field is often imbued with emotions, shaped by power relations and influenced by participants’ voice and agency. Though enough has been written about ethnography, discussions on the specific challenges of taking notes, particularly in research with children are limited. Drawing on three ethnographic field studies with children in schools in the UK, India and China, this article discusses fieldwork experiences to understand the challenges, dilemmas and complexities around note-taking in the field. Using a reflexive and intersectional lens, this article discusses the role of agency, power and emotions in the experiences of taking notes in child-centred research with children. It conceptualizes the need to understand the complexities when theories are operationalized in real-life research contexts.

ABSTRACT This chapter magnifies the voices of Alaskan children in considering education for sustainability in the Arctic. The collaborative research explored how children understood and enacted environmental stewardship in three distinct Alaskan locations: Interior Alaska, the Kenai peninsula, and a rural southwest Alaska Native village. Honoring children’s agency, the study involved child-centered research methods, including children’s drawings and descriptions, role-playing, class discussions, and video tours utilizing wearable cameras. Findings revealed common themes of environmental stewardship, yet the way children perceived and enacted stewardship varied according to the social, cultural, and geographical contexts. Cleaning up litter was perceived as immediate and important for children from Kenai and the southwest Alaskan village, yet it was scarcely mentioned by Interior Alaskan children. Interior Alaskan children emphasized pet care, while children from Kenai and the southwest Alaskan village discussed animal care in relation to hunting and fishing ethics. Care for plants was less common than care for snow. Children’s spatial autonomy, sense of belonging and personal connection with place, plays an important role in the development of competencies to live more sustainably on the land. Findings point towards contextualized and child-centered approaches to promote children’s agency to act in and for their environments.

PurposeWhile recent academic research on entomophagy has predominantly focused on adults, the purpose of this child-centred research is to obtain a better understanding of young consumer acceptance of insect-based foods.Design/methodology/approachTwo qualitative studies were conducted with a total of 43 French children aged 8–13 years. Study 1 (n = 22), based on semi-directive interviews, and Study 2 (n = 21), based on focus groups, included projective techniques and exposure to different types of insect-based products to help children express their feelings and thoughts.FindingsThe evidence shows that in Western children’s minds, insects are considered as culturally non-edible. Children predominantly reject insects as food because of their sensory properties and the disgust they arouse. However, their interest in eating insect-based food is embedded within experiential contexts specific to childhood, in particular the peer group, which makes insect-eating fun and challenging, and the family, which offers a protective and reassuring setting.Practical implicationsThe authors advocate changing children’s sensory perception of insect-eating food through sensory and participatory activities. Manufacturers and policymakers should also draw on children’s peer culture to associate insect-eating with positive social experiences and foster peer influence.Originality/valueDrawing on cognitive psychology theories and the literature in food science on food rejection, the authors contribute to emerging consumer research on alternative food consumption (AFC) focusing on cognitive, emotional and social factors of acceptance or rejection of insect-based foods by children.

ABSTRACT The formation of the sense of belonging is a lifelong process, which has no precise patterns and depends on individual experiences and feelings. For migrant children, it becomes central during transnational transitions and socialisation. To study the anchors and thresholds that shape a transnational sense of belonging of migrant children in Poland, this paper adopts the concept of social anchoring proposed by Grzymała-Kazłowska [2016. “Social Anchoring: Immigrant Identity, Security and Integration Reconnected?.” Sociology 50 (6): 1123–1139]. The study derives from child-centred qualitative research with migrant children, their parents and their teachers. The analysis introduces the four dimensions of belonging formation, namely the formal, social, emotional and symbolic, which determine how migrant schoolchildren negotiate their sense of belonging during transnational transitions. This research stresses the significance of all four dimensions for children's socialisation and underlines that belonging becomes key in children's wellbeing and sets the priorities in multiple spheres, like education, friendship, interests, leisure, or future life plans.

ABSTRACT For decades, research has made children be known mostly through adults’ observations, powers, and narratives. However, during the last years, the recognition of children as social subjects with their own rights has led to the advent of child-centered research approaches that intend to grant relevance and validity to their voices. Some of those initiatives are the Mosaic approach, the creative-participative techniques, and the arts-based approach. This article offers a multimethod research proposal based on the draw-and-tell conversation technique and the principles of Mosaic approach, both applied to tackle children’s social representations toward childhood education. This is part of a research project aiming to explore the representations of childhood and education within different educational actors. This article presents the designed instruments, the protocol, and the results obtained from the application of the methodological proposal. It is concluded that this multimethod design is a valuable tool to carry out future studies on young children within the frame of recognition of children’s rights, as well as children’s agency and participation capacities in the social construction of reality.

Our article draws on research undertaken with children during the 2020–21 COVID-19 pandemic in order to consider the potential of digitally mediated participatory research for child-centred research practice. Our specific focus is on how children’s inclusion can be centred in the absence of opportunities to meet in person. We reflect on how we sought to support children’s engagement through offline and online creative activities and explore how these digitally mediated spaces can facilitate children’s inclusion, creative engagement and dialogue. We offer examples from our arts-based, digitally mediated research to consider how researchers might work remotely, yet inclusively, in contexts where children have been marginalised and their voices silenced. Our research suggests that scaffolding creative activities through bespoke digital animation and asynchronous chat can facilitate children to participate in ways of their choosing. However, to address equity of inclusion researchers must attend to the contingencies of children’s digital, material and social exclusion.

This article explores the ethical and social challenges in research with children exposed to forced labour, exploitation, and trafficking. It examines whether the participation of children in evidence generation has the potential to affect them and how the researcher avoids potential discomfort. This requires investigating the multiple issues and contexts that affect the children. Essentially, conducting a child-centred evidence generation is ethically reasonable based on how such investigation is carried out and on how a child is affected by the research activities. The process of recruiting participants, avoiding potential harm, ensuring privacy, anonymity and confidentiality corresponds to the best possible regulation, in full respect of the interests of children. What is pursued is a child-centred evidence generation, capable of responding in an acceptable way, from an ethical point of view to the question about the methodology of the research itself. In addition, child-centred research enhances the sharing of perspectives and insights, which break down the barriers of exclusion. Against this background, this article contributes to the identification, interpretation, and clarification of ethical and social questions that arise in relation to child-centred evidence generation. Similarly, it furthers awareness on the significance of ethical reflection and in making informed decisions and choices to mitigate against potential harm to participants during and after the research.

ABSTRACT Background In comparison to adult-centred research in physical activity, there are far fewer studies which concentrate on hearing children’s voices in physical activity research. Additionally, despite a number of studies which utilise a child-centred approach, the number of papers which concentrate on the complexities when conducting research with young people are extremely limited. Purpose To consider power relationships between adult researchers and young participants. Also, to provide empirical examples of considerations related to an organic research process and the complexities that may arise during research with children. Data collection and analysis An ethnographic approach is deemed useful when conducting research with children (Davis and Watson 2017), but particular considerations need to be taken into account as an adult conducting research with young people. The data for this paper was drawn from a year-long ethnographic study with junior korfball players (aged 11–13 years of age). The study involved participant observation where the researcher’s role was ‘coaches’ help’. Nine semi-structured interviews took place 10 months into the study, and numerous informal conversations occurred throughout the research. Some of Foucault’s ideas related power were utilised to discuss the way relationships were negotiated with children to maintain a child-centred approach to the research. Final thoughts Adopting an organic approach to research may help reduce young participants’ perceptions of adult power. Adopting a Foucauldian lens can also heighten awareness of power divisions and aid the researcher’s sensitivity to their own use of techniques of power whilst in the field. Additionally, an organic approach can also help facilitate child-centred research which empowers participants and supports their voices being heard.