Research with Children: Ethical Mind-fields

This article explores some ethical issues involved in research with young children. Research that involves children always contains assumptions about the nature of the child and of childhood in general and these can affect every aspect of the research undertaken with them, particularly ethical concerns. Seeing children as social actors, not as passive participants, has profound implications for researchers who work with children, particularly in how power relations between adults and children are conceived and experienced. In this article I problematise these relations through analysis of taped transcribed conversations with children. ‘While the young have always been identifiable by their physical size and age, the meanings these differences have been given are not universal’ (Baker, 1998, p. 117).