Research Ethics: How to Listen to Kids and Do No Harm
By Jessie Tobin, Lisa Yu, and Kristen C. Wilcox
Kids, as major stakeholders in their own educational experiences, have a lot to lose when they don’t have opportunities to voice their own opinions, take actions about things they care about, and have some choices in how they might shape their own futures.
In the research literature, the benefits of engaging young people in these ways, has been shown to meet the grander aims of 21st Century democratic citizenship as when kids are engaged as partners in research they take on the roles of knowledge generators and transformers.
To address the need to include young people’s voices in our research and engage them as research partners, our NYKids research team designed and implemented a College and Career Readiness (CCR) Student Study in the 2019-2020 school year. This study builds upon our previous Phase I CCR study that included only adult participants.
For our study, we interviewed and conducted focus groups with high school students from two positive outlier schools (i.e. those schools achieving above-predicted graduation outcomes taking into account demographic variables). These two schools were included in our study as they represent very different types of communities—one in rural upstate NY (Crown Point Central School) and one in the metropolitan region on Long Island (Malverne Senior High School). We conducted a total of 22 interviews, 5 focus groups and collected 14 documents and 76 artifacts from 22 eleventh and twelfth grade participants.
Research Ethics and Principles
In order for our recent student study to have been approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at the University at Albany, our proposed research needed to adhere to three ethical principles. These principles originate from the Belmont Report of 1979 and govern the research on human subjects in all research institutions in the U.S.. The first principle is Respect for Persons, which stipulates that individuals must be treated as autonomous agents and those with lessened autonomy must be protected. The next principle is Beneficence, which states that researchers must do no harm, and maximize possible benefits and minimize possible harm. Lastly, the principle of Justice holds researchers accountable to fairly distribute the burdens and benefits of their work. For our latest study, several provisions under these ethical guidelines warranted our attention. In particular, our team followed protocols to protect the confidentiality of participants.
Processes to Ensure Confidentiality
Before conducting research, our team at NYKids was required to complete several documents for approval from the university IRB. One of these forms was a Protocol Submission, where we described the steps of our study in accordance with the ethical principles for human subjects research. Within the Protocol Submission, our team outlined some of the procedures we would follow to protect the students in our study. Some of these include:
#1 One-way Interaction for Recruitment
To recruit participants, for example, our researchers sent a sealed Parental Permission and Parental Child Demographic Questionnaire to parents via the students, under the direct supervision of school leaders. Parents who were willing to allow their child to participate in our study were to sign and return these forms. By doing this, we only allowed one-way interaction when we recruited participants for this study, and avoided collecting information from students who were not willing to join the study.
#2 Protection of Students’ Privacy
In our interviews with student participants, researchers ensured that there was a private room with a door on school property to protect student privacy during the interviews. We were also aware of the risk that students might share sensitive information in front of their peers in focus groups. To address this, our research team asked students to respect the confidentiality of others by not sharing anything they heard outside of the group.
#3 Removal of Student Identifiers
In addition to student interviews and focus groups, we also collected student-produced artifacts such as timelines of their experiences in high school and ecological maps outlining places they spend their time in and out of school. To maintain confidentiality, we removed all names and identifying information on all of these materials and replaced them with pseudonyms to hide students’ real names and identities.
Finally, in the data analysis phase, our NYKids team members transcribed data and then coded transcripts using a qualitative data reduction software program (NVivo) that we stored on our password-protected server.
While IRB requirements for ethical treatment of research participants may not be required of those working within schools, these principles can provide guidance in how to conduct research with kids following ethical principles. In addition, while school-based research teams may not have budgets or time for transcription services or qualitative software programs, some free options that can streamline these tasks are available online and teachers may provide creative ways to incorporate research tasks in classroom assignments and thereby engage young people as research partners.
Stay tuned as NYKids will continue to share details about our research methods and procedures and provide resources and recommendations for others to conduct research with kids. Please also look for new research findings and case study reports from the NYKids student study in our blogs on NYKids Facebook and Twitter in the coming weeks. As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions and requests for research support at nykids@albany.edu.
