Picturing informed consent: Exploring participatory visual methods to enhance meaningful consent conversations with young people

Informed consent (IC) is a cornerstone of ethical research, ensuring participants are informed and provide voluntary agreement to participate. Yet IC remains complex, especially in research with young people, and practical examples for engaging youth meaningfully in IC processes are limited. Participatory visual methodologies engage youth as knowledge producers to think creatively, express diverse perspectives, and engage in dialog. This study explores how participatory visual methodologies can involve youth in IC by inviting them to create and discuss visual representations of its key concepts. Grounded in literature on research ethics with young people, we ask: How do young people in Cameroon represent some of the core concepts within IC visually, and what kinds of conversations emerge around these representations? To address these questions, we conducted workshops with 56 young people (10–16 years old) in Cameroon’s Southwest and Northwest Regions. Participants took photos to represent and discuss the benefits and risks of research, voluntary participation, and confidentiality as key elements of IC, and created visual representations of IC forms. Findings show that incorporating visual elements in IC prompted participants to critically engage with IC, facilitating a deeper contextualized and nuanced understanding and meaningful dialog about both the notion of consent and the study they are potentially consenting to. This study presents a case on adolescents and IC in an African context, emphasizing the importance of social and cultural factors in IC and contributing to literature that largely focuses on younger children in Western settings. Integrating participatory visual methods reframed IC as a collaborative, group-centered process rather than a researcher-driven, one-time event. These findings highlight the potential of participatory visual approaches to deepen youth engagement in research ethics, contributing to more equitable and locally relevant research practices.