Negotiating confidentiality, privacy and consent in focus groups with children and young people.
From The Embassy of Good Science
ResourcesCases
Negotiating confidentiality, privacy and consent in focus groups with children and young people.
What is this about?
In 2015, the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse contracted us to complete a study to understand what children need to be safe and feel safe in organisations such as schools, sporting groups, religious institutions and holiday camps. In focus groups, children and young people considered what it meant to be safe, what adults and organisations were doing and could do to improve their safety and prevent safety concerns (such as abuse) and to ensure that adults and organisations responded in child-friendly ways.
In our participatory research projects we have worked with a number of child and youth advisory groups to guide and strengthen our practice. We seek their feedback on the nature and purpose of our studies and advice on the ethical challenges of conducting sensitive research with groups often deemed ‘vulnerable’. For the Children’s Safety Study we recruited three groups of advisers: one was made up of primary-school-aged children (11-12 year olds), another from high-school-aged young people (15-16 years) and a group comprising young people from an alternate education program (aged 13-17 years).
