Credit for image: Surveystance

When I was at the British Educational Research Association annual conference at Brighton earlier this month, I attended a thought provoking presentation led by Elsie Whittington, from University of Sussex, entitled Consent Education: Undoing the Binary and Embracing Ambiguity. She won 2nd price in the early career researcher presentation awards, very deservedly. Elsie was discussing her research with adolescents about what constituted consent in the context of personal, social, health and education (PSHE Association Curriculum). When fully published this will illuminate how young people in her study expressed the way their perceptions and behaviours are affected by complex emotional, cognitive and social factors. From an ethical point of view, in terms of the research implications undertaken in school contexts, Elsie raised the contradiction faced by the young people about being at school, for which they have not given active consent, and being asked to discuss consent. For me this raises the need when planning research in compulsory educational settings, or other non-consenting settings such as prisons/young offender units or medical institutions, in which inhabitants have been sectioned, to take full consideration of this contradiction as perceived/experienced by participants. Elsie’s study and many others using participatory research methods, for example those discussed on the FutureLearn course People Studying People: Ethics in Society and also hosted on Doing Ethical Research), offer appropriate methodological approaches. In such studies researchers create the safe and open spaces, using ‘young people-appropriate’ methods of data collection, which could allow raising this as an issue as part of gaining their informed consent to participate in any research.

Of course, gaining consent from young people (and not just relying on their parents/carers/guardians as gatekeepers), is always important – not just in such contexts. This should not be something we expect to be possible to gain in advance and taken as read for the whole study. If potential participants have not experienced such research before, how can they really know how they feel about it/what the implications are for them? Being able to be fully informed and give full and meaningful consent, will develop as a study develops. This was something we discussed as part of the Ethics in Educational Ethnography symposium at the European Educational Research Association conference last month, particularly in response to Ingrid Smette’s presentation Ethics and Access when Consent must come first. Consequences of Formalised Research Ethics for Ethnographic Fieldwork in Schools .