A defining feature of much of our work is that it adopts a children’s rights-based approach. This means that:
- It is our obligation as researchers to ensure that all of our work promotes and protects children’s human rights and well-being.
- We need to develop our capacities, as researchers, to enable us to conduct meaningful and ethically-robust research involving children, and to build capacities in others, through our research, to promote and protect children.
- We recognise children as active rights-holders and agents shaping their own lives. This means that children should have a say in what the research priorities should be, rather than simply as passive objects or subjects of our research.
With funding from the engage@liverpool programme, we held a series of workshops in 2017-2018 to explore some of the ethical challenges and good practice relating to research involving children and childhood. This informed the development of a series of briefing papers outlining key ethical considerations that researchers should take into account, as well as links to key ethical resources and templates.
Young Persons Advisory Group (YPAG)
We have also established a Young Persons Advisory Group, involving children and young people from a range of backgrounds across the city. They provide feedback on researchers upcoming projects.
Find out how you could discuss your research with young people here.