Ethical stumbling blocks: Negotiating ethics as a regulatory regime in ethnographic research with young people

This article explores the growing divide between innovative youth and childhood research methodologies and rigid ethics review frameworks. While youth studies have advanced participatory and context-sensitive ethnographic methods to empower young people as knowledge producers, ethical review and data protection processes remain dominated by biomedical models, with rigid, top-down, “one-size-fits-all” regulations. Using the example of a research study involving youth from a disadvantaged area in Malmö, Sweden, we highlight the tensions between the juridical ethical regulations in Sweden, and the nuanced realities of fieldwork. Focusing particularly on procedures of access and informed consent, the article shows how rigid ethics protocols and procedures risk obscuring important ethical considerations, potentially undermining the agency of young participants, silencing them, and even putting them in vulnerable situations. The article calls for a rethinking of research ethics frameworks, especially in qualitative research, to allow for more flexibility in ethically sensitive, participant-centred studies, ensuring that the voices of young people are not lost in the pursuit of conformity with regulatory regimes.