Immediacy of fieldwork in participatory research with children in precarious contexts
From The Embassy of Good Science
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Immediacy of fieldwork in participatory research with children in precarious contexts
What is this about?
Conducting participatory fieldwork with children can result in a researcher becoming involved in their lives more broadly, blurring the lines around the researcher role. This may be particularly the case when working with children in precarious situations, such as AIDS-affected children, parentless children, child beggars, child laborers, and street children. As educated, relatively wealthy, interested and supportive adults, researchers appear to hold considerable power and children may see this as a potential benefit or asset that could help to improve their situation. Researchers who undertake research with children in these sorts of contexts are generally motived by social justice and seek through their work to help improve the conditions of these children’s lives and others like them. These underlying motivations – a desire to be helped and a desire to help – can create added ethical complexity to participatory research relationships, particularly in relation to expectations, safety and capacity. In this case study, which is somewhat connected to my case study in the Payment and Compensation section on reciprocity in participatory research with children, I draw on an example of an incident involving the police and street children that occurred when I was undertaking participatory research in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
