Children and Young People S Views of Social Research
1
CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE’S VIEWS OF SOCIAL RESEARCH:
THE CASE OF RESEARCH ON HOME-SCHOOL RELATIONS
Rosalind Edwards and Pam Alldred
Social Sciences Research Centre
South Bank University, UK
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, The Queen's University of Belfast, August 27th - 30th 1998
Introduction
Until recently, in the British context, the literature on the ethics of research with children has largely been produced from within the field of medical and psychological research, and is mostly concerned with the risks that children are exposed to through participation in clinical studies. It is, as Virginia Morrow and Martin Richards (1996) point out, of limited relevance to social or educational research, not least because the questions raised about potential benefits for or damage to children (individually or collectively) - on the face of it - would appear to be more clear cut in clinical research. Latterly, though, there has been a concern amongst British researchers in the field of childhood studies to both produce guidelines and explore ethical practice in social research that gathers empirical material from children (for example, Alderson 1995; Morrow and Richards 1996; Milner and Carolin 1998). Much of this attention is framed within a general concern to ‘empower’ children through making their voices heard. This has produced discussions of much value. However, there is very little attention given to exploring how children view research about children and therefore what understandings inform their decisions about participation. Without considering how the children we research understand and feel about research itself, as well as our particular topic, we risk developing ethical guidelines which are somewhat divorced from, or altered by, their contexts.
This article examines children and young people’s views about being asked to participate in research, drawing on empirical data from our study on ‘Children’s Understandings of Parental Involvement in Education’, funded under the ESRC Children 5-16 Programme. [1] We argue that children’s opinions about research on children, and the understandings that inform their decisions to participate in it, are strongly linked to the meaning of the topic of the particular research project in the context of their lives generally. This context operates at three ‘levels’. Firstly, there is the immediate personal, social context - in our case of ‘home’ and ‘school’, and here our access to children through the latter is significant. Secondly, there is the context of socio-structural characteristics, such as gender, class, ethnicity and age, and their relationship to cultural understandings, as experienced and negotiated at the local, social spatial, level. And lastly, there is the broader, shaping, context of the social processes of institutionalisation, familialisation and individualisation in contemporary children’s lives generally. Although we have just listed these contextual ‘levels’, this should not be taken to imply that they are separate from each other. In practice they are implicated in each other, including in children and young people’s understandings, as we will show. However, because these contextual ‘levels’ are interlocking, their concrete implications are variable rather than uniform.
We begin with a discussion of the broader contextual processes and their enactment in particular policy and professional approaches to home-school relations. After explaining our topic and methods, we then go on the examine the ways that these and the other contexts have relevance for children’s understandings of research, and of research on the topic of parental involvement in education particularly.
Institutionalisation, Familialisation, Individualisation and Home-School Relations
School and home are sites that are overtly implicated in two of the three main social processes identified as affecting contemporary (western) children’s lives: institutionalisation, familialisation and individualisation (see discussion in Brannen and O’Brien 1995). The process of institutionalisation represents children’s increasing location and compartmentalisation in separate, and protected, institutional or organised settings, including as pupils in schools. Under the process of familialisation, located as sons, daughters, brothers, sisters and so on in the home, children are increasingly conceptualised in terms of their familial dependency status. This has been reinforced by prolongation of the education aspect of institutionalisation in young people’s lives particularly, with the shrinking of youth labour markets and benefits for young people, and an emphasis on, and growth of, further education and training. Familialisation involves an emphasis on children’s home environment and on their being the financial and social responsibility of their ‘parents’ - in practice implicating mothers, rather than fathers, especially in terms of upbringing and home (see David et al 1997).
The third process, of individualisation, appears to contradict the other two trends, with its emphasis on the individual reflexively shaping their personhood (the ‘project of the self’), and with children posed as individual social actors. Indeed, it is the concept of reflexive social action implicated in this very process that forms a base for arguments that children can (and should) be informants on their own lives in social research concerning them. Along with the other two social processes it thus forms a context for our research topic (which we describe below) - the fact that we have been able to conceive of it - as well as for the research process. However, Julia Brannen and Margaret O’Brien (1995) argue that any contradiction between individualisation and the two other social processes is more apparent than real. In both institutionalisation (including, here, as pupils in schools) and familialisation (including as part of parental childrearing values - see Dahlberg 1996) children are increasingly conceptualised as individualised social actors alongside their collective or group incorporation or affiliation. [2] Others, however, would argue that the institutional setting of school is far less amenable to children as individuated social actors than their home setting (for example, Mayall 1994).
In Britain, we can point to a number of examples of policy proposals and implementations affecting children that are underpinned by one or a (sometimes uneasy) mix of these three social trends (including familialisation and individualisation in the 1989 Children Act, and familialisation in the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act). In particular for our discussion here, the 1998 School Standards and Framework Act reinforces familialisation and institutionalisation. This requires schools to issue a ‘home-school agreement’ to parents of pupils, setting out, amongst other things, parents’ responsibilities for their child’s attendance and punctuality, discipline and good behaviour, and homework completion (see Family Policy Studies Centre, 1998, for description). Parents are ‘expected’ to sign a declaration of their acceptance of the terms of the agreement (although schools must not now make signature either a condition of acceptance of new pupils or a factor in decisions about exclusions, etc.).
The School Standards and Framework Act is the latest instance of a wide-ranging political, academic and practitioner consensus, developed over the past four decades, that parental involvement in education and close home-school links are in children’s best (educational) interests. This consensus is evident in many European and North American countries (see David 1993) A variety of different intervention strategies have been implemented at local levels to link home and school more effectively, and to transform the home into an educational setting (in effect the incorporation, or colonisation, of familialisation by institutionalisation). The imperative for parents to be involved in their children’s education has, to some extent, become a common sense wisdom or truism. In Britain, for example, the magazine Natural Parent advocated making ‘homework more of a family function. Get everyone involved …’ (December 1997, p.13), The Guardian broadsheet newspaper often carries a ‘Parents Page’ alongside its weekly Education Section, while The Independent broadsheet newspaper carried a series for parents on dealing with homework. This trend can also be seen in the marketing of children’s toys as ‘educational’ (rather than simply fun). As we will see later, the dominant home-school partnership discourse can also be drawn on by children as part of their common sense understandings - although it can be undermined by other understandings.
Nevertheless, there has been, and still is, a remarkable silence about children (either collectively or individually) as part of the process of home-school relations, rather than as simply manifesting the (educational) outcome or being the (educational) product. As one of us has argued elsewhere (Edwards and David 1997), children and young people are implicitly placed as the inert and passive recipients of the activities of (ungendered) parents and teachers. There is little attention to any part they might play in parental involvement or their own priorities about connections or separations between their home and school lives. It is this silence that our research study aims to remedy, and as part of which we asked children and young people’s views about researching this topic.
Research Focus and Methods
Our project looks at children and young people’s individual and collective understandings and experiences of parental involvement and home-school relations. We are talking in-depth to around 70 primary and secondary school boys and girls, from years 6 and 9, that is at 10 and 14 years respectively. In order to include children from a broad range of backgrounds we have selected a primary and secondary school in each of three contrasting locations: inner-city London, a London suburb and the town of Brighton. Each location has produced a different overall sample, in terms of ethnic diversity and (using eligibility for free school lunch as a form of proxy) levels of deprivation or social class intake.
In London, the inner-city primary and secondary schools each draw pupils from a range of ethnic groups - mainly African-Caribbean, Asian and White. In these schools, over half the pupils receive free school meals because their parents are claiming benefits. The London suburban primary and secondary schools also contain pupils from a range of ethnic groups - mainly Asian and White. However, in these schools only 10 per cent of the pupils have free school meals. The Brighton schools have much less ethnic diversity, being overwhelmingly White and having around 20 per cent of pupils claiming free school meals, which is close to the national average.
The main ways we are talking to children and young people is through small group discussions and individual or pair interviews. However, we start off with an initial, introductory, session with a whole class in each school, where we give out a leaflet explaining what the research is about and the methods we use. We also practically illustrate what the research is about through a series of brainstorming and discussion activities, before asking them to fill in a form individually saying whether and how they want to take part in the research (i.e. as part of a group and/or individually or in a pair). Finally, we hand out another piece of paper on which are printed two questions, with spaces for answers: ‘What do you think about children and young people being asked about home and school and if they fit together?’ and ‘Did the discussion we had in class help you to decide whether or not to take part?’. We provide a ‘postbox’ for the children to put their feedback forms into, so that they feel confident that we cannot match them to their comments (with drawbacks for research conclusions from this exercise, as we note later). [3] This process thus allows the children and young people to give us some written feedback, anonymously, on what they think about research on our topic and about being asked to participate in it, as well as whether or not they found our introductory session useful.
Our introductory session is an attempt to enable children and young people to make informed decisions about whether and how to participate in our research. Consent has been one of the main concerns in the literature on the ethics of social research with children. The final aspect of our introductory session, as an attempt to gain access to how children and young people view research and on what basis they may decide whether or not to participate, as we stated in our introduction, has been less of a focus. It is the material produced by this final exercise that we conducted with whole classes of children that we explore here. There is, of course, the irony that - at this point, during the whole class session - none of the children and young people involved had actually yet consented to take part in our research. Nevertheless, children did not have to hand in the feedback form, or could post a blank one into the box (an issue we will return to).
Before looking at the children and young people’s responses to our questions, we briefly examine further aspects of concerns with consent in the research ethics literature and their underlying impetus.
Consent and Empowerment
As Virginia Morrow and Martin Richards (1996) point out in their overview of the literature on the ethics of social research with children, informed consent to taking part in research is a key preoccupation in discussions about research ethics. Informed consent involves providing potential research subjects with clear and unambiguous information about the purpose and nature of the particular research study, in order that they can make choices about participation. (It may also be an ongoing process throughout the research, rather than a one-off event.) It is seen as particularly problematic in the case of children, with debates usually focusing on their age. Many of the medical and psychological research ethics discussions try to establish rules specifying the age up to which parental consent is necessary, and from which children’s own consent should be gained in addition to their parents’. This invokes the notion of a developmental trajectory - a linear, chronologically sequential and normalised process by which children become competent decision-making adults (Alldred 1998). In other words, children are constructed as ‘human becomings’ rather than human beings (Bardy and Englebert 1994; Qvortrup 1987). (It may also invoke notions of the law and parental rights, but the legal position here is by no means clear - see Alderson, 1995, p.22.)
As researchers in the field of childhood studies point out, however, chronological age and competence are not the same thing (including Alderson 1995; Morrow and Richards 1996; Thompson 1992). Indeed, some make efforts to demonstrate that, even at quite a young age, children can make informed decisions if given adequate information in terms they can understand. Rather, it is argued, “children’s competence to consent to participate in research depends partly on the context and partly on precisely what they are consenting to undertake.” (Morrow and Richards, 1996, p.95). Thus, no abstract and universal prescriptive ethical rules can unthinkingly be followed in empirical social research with children, only guidelines for thoughtful considerations within and about the specific context (such as those produced by Alderson 1995). These are conclusions that have been reached by many feminists and others discussing ethics generally, and research ethics specifically (although such discussion is usually implicitly in relation to adults) (for example, Finch 1986, chapter 9; Sevenhuijsen 1998). Here we go further, to show that it is not just children and young people’s competence to consent that is dependent on context and substance, but that context and substance also inform how they understand the research and make decisions about whether or not to participate. We will return to the issue of consent again as part of our consideration of this.
The debate about whether or not children are able themselves to consent to taking part in research, or whether their parents should consent on their behalf, illustrates some of the tensions between the social processes of individualisation and familialisation. Are children able to reflect upon, and take responsibility for, decisions about taking part in research, or should their parents have and take that responsibility for them? Indeed, underlying much of the discussion of consent for childhood researchers is a concern with issues of power - to treat children as active subjects of research rather than passive objects, to hear their voices, and to respect and empower them. As many commentators in the area point out, presumptions about the nature of childhood largely render children and young people socially powerless and silenced in relation to adults (for example, Alldred 1998; Lansdown 1994). We do not have “a culture of listening to children” (Lansdown, 1994, p.38), and it is only recently in Britain that, in principle and in practice, children have been given a voice in some of the matters affecting them under the 1989 Children Act and the 1991 ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Research is seen as another potential arena for ‘hearing children’s voices’, recognising them as subjects and empowering them. For some, this does not need to stop with merely ‘hearing’ children in terms of collecting data from them, but can extend into involving them as researchers in setting research agendas and in the collection, analysis and presentation of data (for example, Alderson 1995).