Chapter 23: Participatory Rights-Based Research: Learning from Young Children’s Perspectives in Research that Affects Their Lives

Children have been involved in research for many years. Educational and psychological research has contributed a great deal to our understanding of children, their development and education and has been influential in the generation of many of the policy and practice directions evident in early childhood education (Woodhead & Faulkner, 2008). However, in recent decades such research has also been critiqued for its emphasis on children as objects of research (James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998) or as part of a larger unit, such as a family or school (Kellett, 2005), and for the approaches adopted (Alderson & Morrow, 2004).

These critiques have been at the heart of major shifts in the ways in which children and childhood are regarded and have led to an increasing focus on researchers seeking to understand children’s lives and experiences through engaging with them in research. Rather than attend mainly to what children will become in the future, this focus considers children in the present and investigates issues that impact on their everyday experiences, attending to children as beings, rather than becomings (Qvortrup, 1994). Reconceptualizations of children and childhood have also been supported by the discourses of citizenship and children’s rights (Jans, 2004; United Nations, 1989), which recognize all children as citizens with rights to have their voices heard and to be taken seriously.