The Narrative Approach to Informed Consent: Empowering Young Children’s Rights and Meaningful Participation

The Narrative Approach to Informed Consent: Empowering Young Children’s Rights and Meaningful Participation is a practical guide for researchers who want to engage young children in rights-based, participatory research. This book presents the Narrative Approach, an original and innovative method to help children understand their participation in research. This approach moves away from traditional paper-based consent to tailor the informed consent process to the specific needs of young children. Through the Informing Story, which employs a combination of interaction, information and narrative, this method enables children to comprehend concepts through storytelling. Researchers are stepped through the development of an Informing Story so that they can deliver accurate information to young children about what their participation in research is likely to involve. To further inform practice, the book documents the implementation of the Narrative Approach in four case studies demonstrating the variety of settings in which the method can be applied.

The Narrative Approach to Informed Consent addresses the rights of young children to be properly researched, expands opportunities for their active and engaged research participation, and creates a unique conceptual ethical space within which meaningful informed consent can occur. This book will be an invaluable tool for novice and experienced researchers and is applicable to a wide range of education and non-education contexts.

Fiona Mayne is a lecturer and researcher in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Western Australia. Fiona’s PhD in early childhood research ethics and participation won the international European Early Childhood Education Research Association Student Research Award in 2017. Her current research is in children’s voice and agency, enhancing the quality of young children’s research participation, digital influences on children’s learning environments and associated pedagogies, and use of digital technologies and mixed reality in pre-service teacher education.

Christine Howitt is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Western Australia. Her research interests focus on young children's science learning, science identity, learning in informal contexts, participatory research and rights of the child. She has worked extensively with Fiona Mayne to produce a range of papers on young children’s active involvement in the research process, exploring appropriate ethical and methodological approaches.