Ostensibly small moments and their ethical implications in research with care experienced children and young people

Over recent decades, a focus on children’s rights has led to their increased involvement in research. However, ethical reflections on dynamics which shape and produce children’s voice within research encounters remain under-explored. Social work research involving children on sensitive topics must balance their right to participate with avoiding harm. This paper reflects on two vignettes from our longitudinal study on care-experienced children in Scotland, which included interviews and 'play and talk’ sessions with 20 children aged three to 15. The two vignettes, and other examples from research interviews, were selected to illustrate moments that caused us to pause and interrogate the ethical implications of research encounters for children, families and researchers. The first vignette explores how consent and research engagement were negotiated, resisted, and facilitated relationally among the child, researcher and the child’s aunt. The second vignette examines family dynamics during interviews and what happens when the research visit creates a space for children and adults to ask questions about their lives. By analysing both vignettes, we consider how ostensibly small decisions and points of interaction during research interviews had outsized implications for the research. We explore how we enacted ethics, including by using peer support to reflect on the choices we made utilising an ethic of care and an ethic of justice as helpful theoretical lenses. We discuss how children communicated their views and choices to us, using subtle signs, and what we learned about listening and responding to children and their families when confronted with difficult ethical moments.