Mediated situational ethics in cross-cultural child participatory research

Cross-cultural child participatory research faces a fundamental ethical irony: institutional ethics review systems designed to protect participants may inadvertently constrain children’s agency and produce the harms they aim to prevent. Drawing on reflexive methodological analysis of participatory research in early childhood settings in Australia and China, contexts with discrepant ethics governance infrastructures, the paper develops a framework of mediated situational ethics. Ethical tensions emerge across three interconnected layers: institutional (risk misclassification and gatekeeping), cultural (non-translatable ethical concepts), and relational (children’s emergent agency versus static protocols). Researchers function as ethical mediators navigating these tensions through three interrelated practices: translating institutional requirements into culturally meaningful action, negotiating competing ethical principles, and making real-time situated judgements. Ethical integrity under structural asymmetry requires sustained reflexive engagement with irreducible tensions. The paper contributes theoretical understanding of how Global North-South asymmetries produce multi-layered ethical tensions and offers guidance for cross-cultural participatory research with children.