Children and young people’s participation in research

Children and young people’s participation in research can mean anything from taking part in adults’ research projects, to working in partnership with adults to plan and conduct research, to carrying out their own research projects with support from adults. This chapter focuses on the second and third of these.

Children and young people’s participation in research is an area of practice that has developed significantly in the past decade, throwing up both practical challenges in terms of how to make children and young people’s participation real and theoretical/methodological questions about the value of their research and how it differs from research by adults.

This chapter will focus mainly on the practical challenges but in the process will also consider some of the theoretical and methodological questions.

Author: Nigel Thomas