Giving children voices in research - focus on methods

This paper takes its starting point in child focused voice research focusing on children’s perspectives (Warming, 2011). Research shows that involving children’s voices in research is very complex (Cooper, 2021) and many children remain silenced (2017). Therefore, there is a need for increased knowledge about how to establish a solid methodological framework when aiming to empower children's voices about their everyday life in research. It is partly about how they can express themselves in different ways through multi-modal experiences, but it is particularly about putting them in situations where they feel safe and gets a better opportunity to contribute with authentic outputs.
The paper is based on research methods for collecting children’s perspectives. The methods have been used and developed through several research projects that have involved children (for example Ulvseth, 2019; Messiou et al., 2022). The multimodal methods give children opportunity to discuss given subjects with each other, put their experiences in writing, fill in questionnaires, draw, and use pictures. Our experiences show that when children relate to other children instead of an adult when they share their experiences, their contributions become relatively authentic and nuanced.
The presentation will lead to a discussion of whether and how it is possible to give children better opportunities to express their honest opinions in a field dominated by adults, which children are still silenced and what kind of knowledge can the different methods contribute with?