Voices Of Children Research Articles

Quality of life in the voice of children who depend on health technologies: Mixed methods study

ObjectiveTo examine the quality of life of children who depend on health technologies as expressed in their own words. MethodsA parallel and convergent mixed methods design was employed with 30 aged five to 12 year old children who depend on health technologies. Data collection was done through a characterization form, Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory 4.0 questionnaire with the total sample in quantitative phase; semi-structured interviews with a subset of nine participants in qualitative phase. Quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and deductive thematic content analyses, respectively. ResultsFindings from PedsQL 4.0 showed that quality of life for children who depend on health technologies is average. However, data integration through mixed methods showed that this average goes beyond quantitative data through hearing the children's own voices. The results from data integration pointed out that children recognize their limitations and adapt to them; what most affects their quality of life is the emotional domain; children reported suffering prejudice due to their physical limitations; and that the school positively impacts their quality of life. ConclusionsData integration highlighted that children acknowledge their limitations and pain generated by these devices. Concerns about the future and the ability to do things that other children the same age can do was the most impactful aspect on their quality of life. Implications for practiceNursing care plans should consider that what affects most children who depend on health technologies' quality of life is anxiety for the future of being incapacitated or dependent.

Special education documents and young children's right to be heard

AbstractThe aim of this article was to explore whether and how special education documents incorporate efforts to hear young children. The study is based on an in‐depth analysis of expert assessments and individual education plans (IEP) pertaining to 17 children enrolled in early education and care (ECEC) institutions in Norway. The documents are scrutinized for explicit attempts to hear young children, as well as in‐depth analysis of descriptions of children to see if the text convey efforts to include their perspectives. The findings reveal a clear absence of explicit attempts to listen to children during the assessment process. However, the assessments include information obtained from parents and ECEC regarding children's preferences and interests, suggesting an attempt to represent children's voices by proxy. Although the documents contain various descriptions of children's verbal and non‐verbal expressions, these descriptions primarily serve as illustrations of their challenges. The assessments portray children as individuals with difficulties, positioning them as mere ‘cases’. At the same time, recommendations and plans for support emphasize listening to children's voices. The findings of this study suggest a need to redefine special education documents in order to listen to children's views and to incorporate alternative understandings into the assessment process.

Adapted Physical Education in Brazilian Public Schools: A Systematic Review Towards Pupils with Special Educational Needs

Adapted Physical Education (APE) in Brazilian public schools: a systematic review towards children with Special Educational Needs. The main purpose of this review was to verify empirical studies on adapted physical education for all students with special educational needs (SEN) in Brazilian public schools over the past 15 years, hence proposing future research guidelines. A systematic procedure for searching the literature was used to, which covered a total of 28 research-based papers from computerized Scopus database. Mixed methods inquiries were employed in the reviewed studies. The publication descriptor data were quantitatively examined via VOSviewer software (van Eck & Waltman, 2010), while applying the content perspective on the descriptive data to assist the trustworthiness and credibility of the analysis. Results demonstrated that except for Haegele et al (2017)/Meletti & Ribeiro (2104) among the studies, deficiencies exist in past literature relative to the adapted physical education in Brazilian public schools. In practical terms this highlights that the voice of children with special educational needs have not been heard yet in the official literature. Future research might need to consider, despite the mostly favorable consensus about inclusion subject, teachers’ feelings, their supports, and resources to effectively conceive adapted physical education programs.

Inspiring lifelong learners in the NQN year

Imogen Stopforth, newly qualified Nanny from Norland College, discusses her fourth and final year of the practical Norland diploma, the Newly Qualified Nanny (NQN) year, looking after a two-year-old girl in London. She considers how important it is to listen to the voices of young children in our care and to always make learning fun.

Toward a Conceptual Understanding of Inclusion as Intersubjective Experiences

Inclusion has become a global buzzword relating to education policy and practice. Mostly, it is tied to discussions about access and opportunities in education spaces as well as school policies and the curriculum decisions and pedagogical actions of teachers. As part of this critique, we propose defining inclusion as intersubjective experiences associated with feelings of belonging, acceptance, and value that are dynamic, ephemeral, spatial, and in flux. Here, we advocate for centering the experiences and amplifying the voices of disabled children and young people in and about education spaces, while acknowledging the wider social forces that structure those spaces, as only disabled young people can explain how they feel in the educational spaces where they find themselves.

"It Doesn't Cure, but It Protects": COVID-19 Vaccines through the Eyes of Children and Their Parents.

Recently, studies have examined COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and/or hesitancy amongst adult populations across the globe. However, there is a paucity of literature illustrating children's voices in vaccination debates. This article draws on qualitative data collected via a mixed-methods study that explored South Africans' experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2021. Interviews were conducted with a purposive sample (N = 29) of children (>18 years) and their parents regarding their initial perspectives on COVID-19 vaccines. Given the dyadic nature of our study, we explored the intergenerational influence that parents' perspectives had on children's vaccine acceptability and the role that vaccine literacy, or lack thereof, played in vaccine decision making. Findings showed a great level of vaccine acceptability among children and parents, where many placed hopes in the vaccines to promote societal health and wellbeing. Intergenerational transfer of perspectives was observed where children's willingness to receive a vaccine was intrinsically linked to their parents' vaccine acceptability. Some participants also expressed concerns about COVID-19 vaccines, related to misinformation, mistrust, and limited vaccine literacy. We discuss the findings as they relate to vaccine and health literacy, also considering the prospective implications of this work as we enter the "recovery" period of the pandemic.

Supporting Children's Social Connection and Well-Being in School-Age Care: Mixed Methods Evaluation of the Connect, Promote, and Protect Program.

School-age care, such as outside school hours care (OSHC), is the fastest-growing childhood education sector in Australia. OSHC provides a unique opportunity to deliver programs to enhance primary school-age children's social, emotional, physical, and cognitive well-being. This study aimed to pilot the co-designed Connect, Promote, and Protect Program (CP3) and conduct formative and process evaluations on how well the CP3 achieved its intended aims, ascertain areas for improvement, and determine how the CP3 model could be better sustained and extended into OSHC settings. A naturalistic formative and process evaluation of the CP3 implementation was undertaken at 1 and then 5 OSHC sites. Qualitative and quantitative feedback from stakeholders (eg, children, OSHC educators, volunteers, and families) was collected and incorporated iteratively for program improvement. The formative and process evaluations demonstrated high program engagement, appropriateness, and acceptability. Co-design with children was viewed as highly acceptable and empowered children to be part of the decision-making in OSHC. Feedback highlighted how the CP3 supported children in the 4 CP3 domains: Build Well-being and Resilience, Broaden Horizons, Inspire and Engage, and Connect Communities. Qualitative reports suggested that children's well-being and resilience were indirectly supported through the Broaden Horizons, Inspire and Engage, and Connect Communities CP3 principles. Matched-sample 2-tailed t tests found that children's prosocial behaviors increased (mean difference=0.64; P=.04; t57=-2.06, 95% CI -1.36 to -0.02) and peer problems decreased (mean difference=-0.69; P=.01; t57=2.57, 95% CI 0.14-1.13) after participating in the CP3. Program feasibility was high but dependent on additional resources and CP3 coordinator support. To our knowledge, the CP3 is the first co-designed well-being program developed and evaluated specifically for OSHC services. This early evidence is promising. The CP3 may provide a unique opportunity to respond to the voices of children in OSHC and those that support them through creative and engaging co-designed activities. Our research suggests that CP3 provides OSHC with a framework and high-quality program planning tool that promotes tailored interventions developed based on the unique needs and preferences of those who will use them.

The effects of small class sizes on students' academic achievement, socioemotional development and well-being in special education: A systematic review.

The effects of small class sizes on students' academic achievement, socioemotional development and well-being in special education: A systematic review.

Voice acoustics allow classifying autism spectrum disorder with high accuracy

Early identification of children on the autism spectrum is crucial for early intervention with long-term positive effects on symptoms and skills. The need for improved objective autism detection tools is emphasized by the poor diagnostic power in current tools. Here, we aim to evaluate the classification performance of acoustic features of the voice in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with respect to a heterogeneous control group (composed of neurotypical children, children with Developmental Language Disorder [DLD] and children with sensorineural hearing loss with Cochlear Implant [CI]). This retrospective diagnostic study was conducted at the Child Psychiatry Unit of Tours University Hospital (France). A total of 108 children, including 38 diagnosed with ASD (8.5 ± 0.25 years), 24 typically developing (TD; 8.2 ± 0.32 years) and 46 children with atypical development (DLD and CI; 7.9 ± 0.36 years) were enrolled in our studies. The acoustic properties of speech samples produced by children in the context of a nonword repetition task were measured. We used a Monte Carlo cross-validation with an ROC (Receiving Operator Characteristic) supervised k-Means clustering algorithm to develop a classification model that can differentially classify a child with an unknown disorder. We showed that voice acoustics classified autism diagnosis with an overall accuracy of 91% [CI95%, 90.40%-91.65%] against TD children, and of 85% [CI95%, 84.5%–86.6%] against an heterogenous group of non-autistic children. Accuracy reported here with multivariate analysis combined with Monte Carlo cross-validation is higher than in previous studies. Our findings demonstrate that easy-to-measure voice acoustic parameters could be used as a diagnostic aid tool, specific to ASD.

Child Labour and Capitalist Social Engineering in Africa: Divorcing Society from the Means of Production

Abstract This article engages with some salient issues relating to child labour in colonial and post-colonial Africa. The central argument hinges on the inconclusive assault of capital on pre-capitalist socio-economic formation in Africa and the urgent intellectual task of liberating the study of child labour from humanitarian, United Nations and non-governmental organisation bureaucrats by privileging the voices of children themselves. The first section deals with historiographical issues, while the second focuses on agriculture, aspects of urban poverty and the emergence of a Lumpenproletariat to examine the transformation from above which took place after the colonial state was created at the turn of the century. The third section addresses two insidious categories of child labour in the post-colony: child trafficking and child soldiers. The final section grapples with the moral economy of child labour by interrogating the complex array of instruments that have emerged on the global scene to address what is today seen as the child labour ‘problem’.

Protection Without Participation Doesn’t Work: Reflections on Our Contribution to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child Based on the Voices of Children in Alternative Care

Protection Without Participation Doesn’t Work: Reflections on Our Contribution to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child Based on the Voices of Children in Alternative Care

Scientific and methodological contribution of the scientist-pedagogue Amina Nugmanova to the musical education of childrenchildren

Nugmanova Amina Abdukarimovna is a famous singer, researcher, scientist, teacher and public figure, teacher with a capital letter, who devoted her life to art and science. Amina Abdukarimovna has lived for the benefit of people all her adult life, showed great attention and love for her people, she made a great contribution to the development of the Kazakh song art. As a creative versatile personality, she has established herself not only as a wonderful performer of folk songs, but also as a scientist who conducted an experimental study on the topic of a PhD thesis devoted to the vocal training of children of different ages. For many years she worked as a teacher in the vocal class, and then as the head of the department at the Kazakh State Women's Teacher Training Institute. She devoted most of her works to the issue of vocal education of children and adolescents based on Kazakh songwriting. Her proposed method of teaching children to sing songs is effective and acceptable in the practice of modern secondary schools.The author also considers in her research the problem of improving the quality of teaching singing at school. In the classroom, students with the help of a teacher on the basis of musical notation learn to perform songs in accordance with local requirements. One of the conditions affecting the quality of classes is the presence of a properly selected song repertoire. Another goal facing the teacher is the opportunity to teach children to understand music and enjoy it in the process of performing.Amina Abdykarimovna can be considered as a person who has deep knowledge in the field of musical education of children and adolescents, who has shown a high level of knowledge of Kazakh, Russian, Chinese languages, fluent in Arabic graphics, who has studied and scientifically substantiated the methodology of teaching singing and educating children's voices developed by her.

The Toy Brick as a Communicative Device for Amplifying Children’s Voices in Research

The Toy Brick as a Communicative Device for Amplifying Children’s Voices in Research

A study on Children perceptions of social exclusion and the structural drivers of discrimination in Norwegian elementary schools

This article explores children's understanding of social exclusion within their school contexts through a critical race theoretical lens and how social exclusion and repression occur in a country whose policy is typically linked with equality and diversity. Our research was conducted in two primary schools in a big city in middle Norway, where urban segregation creates significant differences in school composition. This qualitative study research was made up of fifteen focus group interviews with 46 children from the age of 9 to 12 in two cases of two public schools, one urban and one suburban school. In terms of school demography, the Urban school was in the central part of the city, where local Norwegian origin families have been part of the same neighbourhood for years. The suburban school is located in a high-poverty area and highly segregated along racial, ethnic, and cultural aspects. As previous studies stated, there are structural inequalities in Norwegian schools, still there is a gap on the description of its consequences. This study pay attention to the voice of children and describe school discrimination, isolation, and unsupported processes in both schools. This innovative study shows that children in both school contexts need additional recognition. In addition, we add that educational policies need to be revised by including aims for collaboration, coordination and capacitation of children and families in their school communities and outside the structural limits. Further, we add that local schools should be part of global communities.

Understanding the resilience of children living on an American Indian reservation: A mixed methods participatory study.

To explore the resilience of children, six to thirteen years old, living on a Northern Plains American Indian Reservation using a situation specific nursing theory. American Indian and Alaska Native children experience mental health inequities compared to their white peers, including substance use, suicide, depression, and anxiety. Resilience is a strength of children that can be leveraged to improve their mental health. A parallel convergent mixed methods design. A community advisory board culturally adapted resilience instruments. During two weeks in summer 2022, forty-seven children/caregiver dyads completed surveys about the child's resilience. Descriptive statistics gave the scores of each child's personal, relational, and total resilience. A subset of 20 children participated in a semi-structured interview. Children scored high on overall resilience, and higher on the relational subscale than the personal subscale. Caregiver survey scores were not significantly correlated with their child's scores and were higher than the children's scores. Qualitative coding revealed six themes of resilience. Integration of data showed a concordance and expansion of the quantitative data across themes. The children reported high resilience supported by a strong ecosystem of relationships. Resilience, as explained through children's voices, corroborated with findings from the surveys. Findings will help nurses across sectors of primary, secondary, and tertiary care create resilience-enhancing interventions and prevent mental health crises in this community. This findings from this study will inform local mental health interventions on the Reservation. The study provides a reproducible design to adapt to other Indigenous communities. A community advisory board was a partner in every stage of the study. Children and caregivers participated in data collection. This research provides knowledge that will further social justice efforts within nursing to promote health equity across diverse populations.

The Tree(s) of Hope and Ambition: An arts‐based social science informed, participatory research method to explore children's future hopes, ambitions and support in relation to COVID‐19

AbstractThis paper offers a new child‐centred methodology that explores children's visions of their futures, encourages self‐reflection and depth and shares children's voices with peers and researchers, as unbrokered as possible. This final stage of a longitudinal, arts‐based, social science‐informed project was delivered by partnering with schools in socially disadvantaged areas of Bristol, a UK city. Our two‐phase activity used a Tree metaphor to explore children's hopes, ambitions and support, looking forward to recovery from the COVID‐19 pandemic. The analysis combined multi‐disciplinary thematic and visual‐narrative analysis, and revealed diversity, intersection and individuality in themes that scaled out from the child and their family over different timescales. Themes included emotion (concerns; empathy), experiences (happenings, resources skills; aspirations) and relationships, linked to their recent experiences of COVID‐19 mitigation. The paper reflects critically on children's and researchers' positionality, and the complexities involved in developing research methods that encourage children's autonomy, agency and authenticity.

“They Protect us as if they were our Mom” Masking Attitudes from Freelist Survey Data and Qualitative Interviews in San Diego School Communities

Background: Despite being disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 due to a lack of structural support, marginalized communities have been largely ignored in the politically polarized debate over school masking. In response to this, we sought to explore masking attitudes by centering the voices of parents and children at historically marginalized, predominantly Hispanic schools in southern California. Methods: We conducted a mixed-methods study with parents and children attending 26 low-income predominantly Hispanic-serving elementary schools. A random sample of parents was asked to provide a freelist of words they associate with masking. A subset of parents with children aged 4–6 was recruited from these surveys to participate in parent-child interviews (PCI). We calculated Smith’s salience index for all unique items, stratifying by language (English/Spanish). Item salience guided PCI thematic analysis for additional context and meaning. Results: 648 participants provided 1118 unique freelist items in English and Spanish. 19 parent-child pairs were interviewed, 11 in Spanish and 8 in English. The most salient words were “safety”(0.37), “protection”(0.12), “prevention”(0.05), “health”(0.04), “good”(0.03), “can’t breathe”(0.03), “necessary”(0.02), “care”(0.02), “precaution”(0.02), and “unnecessary”(0.02). Spanish speakers had a more favorable view of masking than English speakers, particularly regarding “protection” (0.20 vs 0.08) and “prevention” (0.10 vs 0.02). Discussion: Masking is an affordable individual-level risk mitigation that protects the communities that have inequitably shouldered the burdens of the COVID-19 pandemic. We recommend that policymakers prioritize the views of those most impacted when deciding on risk mitigation policies like school masking.

Pacific Island children: The use of maps in helping better understand children's lives

Children's voices have been little heard in the Pacific research. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 asserts the child's right to have a say on matters that affect them and for their views to be considered. There has been massive growth in technologically assisted participative research; however, we argue the value of hand drawn maps should not be underestimated in the rush to engage with more advanced techniques. We present data from 267 neighbourhood maps drawn by children in Fiji, Kiribati, Samoa and New Zealand. To better understand the social construction of knowledge in children's everyday lives, we propose two models to conceptualise the complexity of their world, a social connection and a spatial connection model. These models reveal how Pacific Island children negotiate different levels of social connection from home, family, and community through to transnational kinship relations. People, specifically family, provide the geographic basis on which their spatial encounters are overlaid. Irrespective of country or rural/urban/atoll setting, it is social space that is the strongest connector for children as displayed in their maps. Application of our models can be used to reveal how knowledge is socially constructed in Pacific children's everyday lives.

“Can my mother come?” Asylum interviews with unaccompanied and separated children seeking asylum in the Netherlands

IntroductionThe UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) accords children the right to give their views on all important decisions in their life (art.12 CRC). In the past decades increased awareness has risen among professionals who work with children in judicial and administrative proceedings, to hear their voices. The key question guiding this research was whether refugee children have the possibility to meaningfully participate in asylum proceedings, as required by international children's rights law and standards? Asylum application procedures are highly complex administrative procedures, that are often not adapted to the capacities and level of maturity of children. Recent studies suggest that the right to participation and information is insufficiently safeguarded for children involved in asylum procedures. Unaccompanied children seeking asylum as young as 6 years of age have to go through the asylum procedure in the Netherlands. Efforts have been put in making this procedure more child-friendly, by designing a child-friendly interview room and training immigration officers. The aim of this study was to explore to what extent the immigration authority takes into account children's voice, age and development, in line with international children's rights.MethodsObservations have been conducted of first instance asylum application interviews with children held by immigration officers. In total 13 interviews with children aged 7–11 have been observed, that were held between 2012 and 2019.ResultsThe results show that child-friendly conversation techniques and tools are used to some extent, however, immigration officers should be trained more extensively in order to enhance the effective participation of young children.DiscussionIt is concluded that interviews with children could be improved by giving children more information and using techniques to communicate with young children. In order to truly hear the child's voice the interviews should be better adapted to the age and level of development of unaccompanied children.

Children's ideas about COVID-19 and learning loss: Interviews with 10 second-graders

In 2020 and 2021, there has been extensive scholarly and popular discussion about children's learning loss due to COVID-19 and its related school closures. This conversation generally overlooks the voices of young children. This study, set in a US context where children spent a year or more attending school exclusively remotely, reports from interviews with 10 second-graders about how they conceive of loss related to COVID-19 and particularly what it might mean to lose learning. The study finds that the children have extensive ideas about what it means to lose something tangible or intangible, and that their theories about loss are based in well-understood personal experience. It also shows how children use loss narratives to make sense of sociopolitical events and concepts in the world around them, and it offers the possibility that the upheaval wrought by COVID-19 has helped some children become quite emotionally aware and able not only to tolerate but also adaptively defend against difficult feelings. The article emphasizes the importance of foregrounding children's ideas and voices in making sense of their educational experiences.