Minimizing social distance: Participatory research with children

Abstract

This article reviews and critiques an ethical strategy of minimizing social difference between researcher and child in participatory research with children, and drawing on fieldwork, presents an alternative strategy of minimizing social distance. The author argues that an ethical strategy of minimizing social distance between researcher and research subject(s) (1) enables the constitution of difference in relationship, (2) lends research subjects autonomy to contribute to the research relationship, design, and process, and (3) makes ethics central to the project’s implementation, not merely its design. The author advocates for increased methodological conversations across disciplines toward furthering ethical participatory research with children.

Keywords

Ethics participation researcher subjectivity social difference social distance

Introduction

I did 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Southwest China between 2010 and 2012, researching the formation of family bonds among poor, elderly foster mothers and abandoned, disabled foster children. These relationships were facilitated by state orphanages that retained formal guardianship of the children, and many of the disabled children were eventually adopted abroad. Although my research focused primarily on the quality of relations between the state orphanage monitors, the foster parents, and the children, I also conducted participant observation with children inside orphanages, foster homes, and outside the home.

Doing my fieldwork in a tropical and sprawling city of 7 million Chinese, I was met daily with relentless stares and inquiries, and when I traveled to apartment complexes where families had fostered children for decades, foster mothers steered the conversation to news of America. They retreated into their apartments to unearth photos of Chinese children with white parents and letters they could not read or understand. They presented these to me, wanting to know how “their children” were and asking whether I had come to adopt these little ones, who tottered about the concrete courtyard, currently on loan from the local orphanage.

I was incredibly uncomfortable with these Chinese foster mothers’ pleas for me to save their pitiful children whose future was not in China but in the United States.¹ I was even more uncomfortable when elderly women would sidle up beside me and whisper in raspy voices, “which one do you want?” or foster parents would ask children, “do you want to go with this auntie back to America?” “No!” the children would protest and scream, as their parents playfully pushed them toward me, smirking, “I don’t want you! Go!” And the children, gasping in sobs, clamored away from me to cling to their chuckling parents.

But what I encountered over and over in the field was but a basic tenet of participatory research: I was never going to be able to shirk my whiteness, my adulthood, or my Western identity from these people despite my best efforts. However, rather than trying to minimize these social differences or hide these uncomfortable interactions from view, I gradually recognized that the social distance my interlocutors were naturally establishing and my lack of control in the research environment might become some of my greatest resources to understanding how to effect cultural translation.

Over the past few decades, there have been significant shifts in the field of interdisciplinary childhood studies toward approaches that recognize children as social actors and emphasize participatory methods (Christensen and James, 2000, 2008b; Prout and James, 1990; Thomas and O’Kane, 1988). Drawing on the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child’s emphasis on children’s participation rights, researchers have even begun to design and promote studies in which children conduct research with children (Alderson, 2008; Jones, 2004; Roberts, 2008). Heralding this unique symmetry between researcher and informant, a number of recent studies promote an ethical strategy of minimizing social differences between adults and children in participatory research with children (Alderson, 2008; Randall, 2012 [drawing on Mandell, 1988]).

But have these scholars gone too far? While studies in which children research children may expand children’s participation and autonomy, they do not necessarily do so, nor do they automatically resolve the power differentials and hierarchies between children and researchers with which adults are often concerned (Holland et al., 2010; Hunleth, 2011; Thomson, 2007). Hence, this article critiques a strategy of minimizing social difference between the researcher and informant in participatory research with children on the grounds that it reinforces static hierarchies of difference between adults and children, furthers the control of the researcher vis a vis his or her informant, and makes ethical concerns and decisions external to the process of research itself.

In contrast, drawing on my own research and anthropological training, and building on the work of Pia Christensen, Barry Mayall, and William A. Corsaro, I present an alternative ethical strategy² of minimizing social distance in participatory research with children. I suggest that a strategy of minimizing social distance involves the suspension of control on the part of the researcher, which allows for greater apprehension of the social rules of the community, enabling the researcher’s relations to inform understandings of contextually specific social difference. This strategy differs from that of minimizing social difference, which inevitably presumes control to be located in the researcher and the research design, and tends to reproduce understandings of difference from the perspective of the researcher rather than the informant or the child. Finally, I posit that increased methodological transparency regarding the study of children and childhood has the potential to contribute to important interdisciplinary conversation about the development and standardization of research ethics and ethical research.

A strategy of minimizing social difference

In order to analyze the meaning of social difference and the minimizing strategy, let us review the related arguments of Nancy Mandell, Duncan Randall, and Priscilla Alderson. Mandell is well known for her early fieldwork with young children in a preschool, during which she adopted the role of “least-adult” by literally getting into the sandbox beside children (Mandell, 1988). Mandell contrasts this researcher role with ones that delimit participation based on a commitment to objectivity, or semiparticipatory roles that stress the limits of equal participation with children based on cognitive and physical differences (Fine and Glassner, 1979). In comparison, she argues that in the least-adult role the researcher is completely involved as a participant observer, and thus, “even physical differences can be minimized when participating with children as to be inconsequential in interaction” (p. 435). Through multiple, nuanced examples, Mandell articulates how she engaged in “joint action” with children, learned their ways of communication, demonstrated the boundaries of her role, and struggled to adjust and adhere to the logic of children’s social communication.

In his recent article which revisits the least-adult role posited by Mandell, Duncan Randall, a medical professional and a lecturer at the School of Health and Population Services at University of Birmingham, argues that while Mandell’s work has been criticized for its idealism (Christensen, 2004), its underlying principles are nevertheless instructive for conducting research with children (Randall, 2012). Drawing on Mandell,³ Randall (2012) argues that researchers’ ability to minimize social differences between children and themselves will necessarily impact the quality and the interpretation of their work (p. 41), and he cites numerous authors’ concern with the complexity of power dynamics between researchers and children (Christensen, 2004; Clark, 2004; Connolly, 2008).⁴

Similarly, in a recent article, childhood studies scholar Priscilla Alderson discusses the challenges for researchers in overcoming their assumptions regarding children’s competence, and the benefit, even preference, of children doing research with children. Alderson (2008) concludes,

Just as research about women has become far more insightful because women are involved as researchers, the scope of research about children could be expanded by involving children as researchers in many methods, levels and stages of the process. When I interview disabled or black people, I find that although we discuss difficulties that arise from discrimination, we are also partly papering over the cracks of these very differences in order to try to hold equal respectful relationships. In contrast, when black researchers talk with black interviewees their common experiences of these differences can enable them to explore them much more deeply (Scott, 1998) and this shared exploration can apply to children’s research about children. (p. 287)

Taken together, these references to social difference and strategies toward minimizing it in participatory research with children suggest definitions of difference as primarily observable or physical, as well as relatively static or universal, based on age, race, or disability (“… even physical differences can be minimized when participating with children as to be inconsequential in interaction” [Mandell, 1988]; “… when black researchers talk with black interviewees their common experiences of these differences …” [Alderson, 2008]). According to all three authors, such social differences (for Mandell, specifically size, and for Alderson, race, age, or disability), can be overcome when researchers adopt strategies toward becoming more like their research subjects, or in Alderson’s case, replace (adult) researchers with children themselves (see Gallacher and Gallagher’s [2008] discussion of identity’s relationship to knowledge).

The ethical qualms of minimizing social difference

While an ethical strategy of minimizing social difference may put research subjects at ease, and while I agree that social differences can be minimized in the research process, I suggest this strategy is problematic for three reasons. First, a strategy of minimizing social difference between the researcher and the child subject tends to reify and reinforce the very static, universal categories of difference between adult and child they seek to deconstruct. In a much earlier article, Alderson herself, alongside Christopher Goodey, argues that contrary to popular belief, research with children does not raise any unique questions about ethics that are not comparable to those raised by working with other “minority groups.”⁵ Alderson and Goodey (1996) assert that complications in research rarely arise from children’s inabilities but rather from the prejudice ascribed to them from adult society (p. 106). In other words, research with children who are regarded as social actors aims to assess how children themselves interact in their various social worlds (Christensen and James, 2000, 2008b; Corsaro, 1997; Prout and James, 1990), and this perspective is necessarily constrained by judgments adults have made prior to conducting research with children. However, in the above quotation from Alderson, we see that her emphasis on “common experiences of differences” that characterize the researchers and subjects presumes that race or age unify these individuals in standard ways (Christensen and James, 2008a; Gallacher and Gallagher, 2008; Mayall, 2000). Therefore, strategies of minimizing social difference between the researcher and the child subject often threatens to reify and reinforce the very static, universal categories of difference between adult and child they seek to deconstruct.

Second, the strategy of minimizing social difference between the researcher and the child subject places the emphasis on what the researcher can do to control his/her identity and actions in the field vis-a-vis the subject. It is certainly the case that researchers do possess some control over their actions and that researchers must respond when children question their identity (Christensen, 2004). Yet, it is equally significant, and perhaps more important in participatory research, how it is that children relate to and define adults who enter their social worlds. In other words, the emphasis on the active and constructive work of children who are social actors is often forfeited in research strategies that presume the control of the researcher over his or her identity at all times.

To her credit, as Mandell describes her vigilance in maintaining her least-adult role, she also discovers the ability of the children to perceive her in multiple roles without disrupting her relationship. She concludes, “In retrospect, the fear of personal disclosure was based on a traditional, nonreciprocal image of the researcher-subject relationship as being somehow inviolable and contaminated by subjectivity unless distance was maintained” (Mandell, 1988: 445–446). In other words, it is research relationships (social distance), which in participatory research are an ongoing negotiation between researcher and subject, above researcher identities (social difference), which are critically at stake in research with any informant, child or adult.⁶

Finally, a strategy of minimizing social difference in researching children tends to place ethical concerns and decisions beyond the scope of the research relationship, or external to the negotiation of researcher–subject identities (Cassell, 1980; Lederman, 2013). However, given that an emphasis on treating children as social actors locates the constitution of difference between the researcher and the subject, or in the field of research, ethical negotiations are necessarily constituted by those relations as well. The danger of ethical orientations that are external to rather than embedded in the research process is that they threaten “to reify their own distinctive features” (Lederman, 2013: 15), rather than truly producing, for instance, research that aptly discerns children’s perspectives. Thus, I argue that strategies of minimizing social difference in participatory research with children are problematic because they misplace their strategic emphasis on factors seen as external to research (social difference), rather than the internal dynamics of the cultivation of research relationships (social distance).

Minimizing social distance as an ethical strategy in research with children

Drawing inversely from the problems with the minimizing social difference approach to participatory research with children, I suggest an optimal approach (1) enables the constitution of difference within interaction or relationship, (2) lends research subjects freedom to contribute to the construction of the research relationship, design, and process, and (3) recognizes and makes ethics central to the project’s implementation, not merely its design. In this section, I return to my fieldwork and anthropological training, as well as insights from Pia Christensen, William A. Corsaro, and Berry Mayall to highlight how my own struggles with my subject position and communication with both children and adults crystallized this definition of social distance and the ethical strategy of minimizing it.

Constitution of difference within relationship

First, the scene from my fieldwork, with the foster mothers’ recognizing my difference and then teaching this difference to their children by way of playful teasing, made me uncomfortable because it pointed directly to aspects of difference that were contextualized in a way that I had not fully anticipated prior to entering the field and were largely out of my control within the field (Wax, 1979). However, these interactions were also a great source of knowledge, given that the foster mothers prescribed a role to both the children and myself that we, in turn, resisted. The foster mothers interpreted my difference as one that constituted power, even imperialism, and the children were implicated in this complex relationship. This expressed not only the foster mothers’ ambivalence to my power and participation in their community, but also subtly underlined the power dynamics between Chinese parents and children. I learned that my social role as an adult was constituted both by the hierarchical relations between Chinese parents and children, and by my cultural association with adoptive parents who signified fear, uncertainty, and the disruption of foster relationships. Simply put, I inhabited multiple social roles to multiple people (Komulainen, 2007: 24–26).

Thus, an ethical strategy of minimizing social distance involves acknowledging and becoming attuned to, rather than minimizing, social differences that emerge within interactions between researchers and research subjects (Christensen, 1998; Edwards and Mauthner, 2002; Holland et al., 2010). Anthropologists, who presume social difference between the researcher and informant as key to the project of cultural translation, have historically drawn attention to both the problematics of these power dynamics, and the inherently intersubjective and collaborative nature of research (Cassell, 1980; Holmes and Marcus, 2008; Lederman, 2013; Scheper-Hughes, 2004). Minimizing social distance involves recognizing the power inequalities that exist between researchers and informants, and these are best reduced not by minimizing social difference, but by delimiting control. Therefore, successful participatory research must cede control to informants whose local understandings of difference are central to the research produced.

Delimiting researcher control

This knowledge of locally constituted differences between parents, children, and myself was vital as I learned to participate in culturally appropriate ways of yielding control to each of my informants (Christensen and James, 2000; Lederman, 2013: 600). While I was uncomfortable with these parodies of the international market for adoption, they taught me a lot about how the foster mothers viewed adoptive parents. When I bristled at some of the parenting strategies, including these teasing routines,⁷ the foster mothers were quick to articulate their understanding of some of the differences between Eastern and Western parenting techniques.

For instance, on one occasion, several parents pointed out that they had heard American parents are always gentle and never spank their children. I was able to minimize some of the social distance and yet acknowledge the social differences between myself and the foster mothers by revealing that I was spanked as a child, but my parents rarely interacted with me by asking me these types of questions (“Do you want to go to America with this auntie?”). Unveiling my cultural naiveté allowed me to slowly assume the role of cultural novice, even as my appearance connoted a certain power and prestige. Gradually, the foster parents began to divulge frustration regarding the bureaucracy of the orphanage and the difficulty of giving their beloved children away to Westerners, further minimizing our social distance and complicating the distinctions between us (Christensen, 1998: 188–190).

As I began speaking directly with children, I initially copied the blunt questioning that orphanage and international non-governmental organization (INGO) monitors used (“Do you remember your abandonment? Do you remember your time at the orphanage? Do you respect your foster mother?”) and received similar staid, obedient responses. Like Christensen’s (1999, 2004) revelation that her questions reflected her interests, I realized that these questions reflected the INGO and the orphanage’s interests and did not accurately reflect who I was to the children or how they wanted to engage me. These were children whose abandonment had led to lives heavily controlled by adults inside institutions, and yet, with the exception of their foster parents, many of these children harbored an understandable distrust for adults.

Hence, as research went on and relationships developed, I observed that it was in the context of collective dialogue with their foster parents and foster siblings where children opened up about their experiences of abandonment, their feelings, and their hopes for the future (Christensen, 1999, 2004). Much like Berry Mayall’s observation regarding the advantages of conversation as a means of data collection with children (Hood et al., 1996; Mayall, 2008), I noted the ways in which conversation shifted some of these psychological and social hierarchies between adults and children and afforded children a novel freedom to participate and even assert control in the conversation.

For instance, an 11-year-old girl whose abandonment had resulted from her parents’ divorce refused to discuss her experience with orphanage monitors or INGO workers. However, during a conversation over dinner where I was learning about the phenomenon of divorce in China from her foster mother, her foster mother stated that it is traditional for husbands to retain guardianship of the children, but when they remarry, their new wives often reject the children from the previous marriage. These were the exact circumstances of the young girl’s abandonment, and when I turned to her foster mother to ask why these wives often reject the children, the girl chimed in, “In divorce, children become a burden.”

The abstract safety of the collective conversation allowed the young girl the freedom to participate as she wanted and to speak up when she felt she had knowledge to contribute. Over the course of my relationship with the family, it was powerful to see that she and her foster mother contributed distinctly different types of knowledge based on their multiple subject positions to my study. Learning the “rules” of the community required a willingness to cede much control to my informants, both adults and children, but also a willingness to inhabit the distinct social roles that were available to me in a culture that has its own ideas about what it means to be a child and what it means to be an adult (Christensen, 2004: 166, 173–174).

On this point, Berry Mayall’s attention to the culturally specific concept of generation (Hood et al., 1999; Mayall, 2000) and William A. Corsaro’s (1985) adaptation of the reactive adult role in research are particularly insightful. In advocating credence to the culturally specific ways in which generational ideas among adults and children inform understandings and interactions regarding the social world of childhood, Hood, Mayall, and Oliver find that while “generational issues arise in the triangle of researcher, children and carer-gatekeepers,” these can be interpreted and overcome through alternatives that emerge in long-term fieldwork (Hood et al., 1999: 18). In my own fieldwork, the orphanage’s powerful position vis-a-vis these vulnerable children, the subordinate place of children to adults in society, and the relatively subordinate status of their foster caregivers, granted me early and expansive access to foster children and their families. While it would have been disrespectful and culturally inappropriate in the eyes of orphanage officials, for me to further request that each foster family and child sign a formal consent form, playing a “reactive” role in both the interactions with the foster parents and the foster children helped cultivate relationships that generated greater transparency and fuller knowledge of fostering relationships between orphanages, parents, and children.

As Corsaro, who developed the reactive adult role in his research with children notes, all researchers, but perhaps, especially those doing research with children, face “the problem of obtrusion,” in which the researcher experiences social distance because of his/her perceived size and power (Corsaro, 1985: 3). Unlike Mandell, who focuses on the minimization of external factors (physical size) and takes an active approach to research with children (getting into the sandbox alongside the children), Corsaro (1985) relied on field observations of children’s rules of engagement and interaction, and used these internal ethics to structure his reactions to children’s willingness to include him in peer activities, rather than relate to him as an authoritative adult (pp. 28–31). Both Mayall and Corsaro highlight culturally and generationally specific ways in which research relationships can lend participatory freedom and even authority to children, rather than reinforcing culturally or universally static interpretations of difference between researcher and informant.

The internality of ethics within the field of research

Finally, the field observation with which I began draws particular attention to the ways in which ethical orientations to children or other research subjects are not merely externally located, but take shape within the local contexts of difference instantiated by ongoing research relationships. In circumstances like the one mentioned where children were taught to be fearful of me and experienced a certain level of anxiety within our interactions, were my ethical commitments primarily to the orphanage, the foster parents, or the children themselves? What about my own commitments to children in general, shaped by my own cultural beliefs and training? And how might I balance these commitments with those I had to the research project itself? As I’ve described some of the subject relations in my fieldwork, particularly the ones in which children have been implicated in international markets, I have tried to draw attention to the particular ethical challenges of a modernity which generates coeval, yet often uneasy clusters of international orders and local cultures (Appell, 1978; Lederman, 2013).

In her 1980 article, which aptly observes and describes the variance of relations between investigators and subjects in human research, Joan Cassell attempts to provide a unifying ethical paradigm for research in the Kantian imperative, which stipulates that researchers treat subjects “primarily as means rather than ends,” thus recognizing and regarding their autonomy as authenticity plus independence (p. 35). However, as Berry Mayall (2000) suggests, children themselves often view autonomy quite differently than Western adults, placing a high value on interdependence in human relationships, rather than recognizing independence as central to their moral status. Thus, the concept of autonomy Cassell develops within the Kantian imperative is increasingly problematic in cultures, such as that of China, where relations of interdependence among both adults and children are more highly valued than they are in the West. While I agree with Cassell that the ethical practice of fieldwork demands more attention to its moral dilemmas and the development of appropriate ethical principles, I also agree with Mayall’s observation that even the concept of autonomy is generationally and culturally specific.

Pia Christensen and Alan Prout, in their article, “Working with Ethical Symmetry in Social Research with Children,” argue that the very treatment of children as social actors multiplies the complexity of the field of research and creates new ethical problems for doing research with children (Christensen and Prout, 2002: 482). Observing that fieldwork is likely to bring researchers into contact with multiple, different, locally constituted ethics and that these competing ethical frames have no easy resolution, they cite the danger of individual researchers having to rely solely on themselves, which produces idiosyncratic negotiation (Christensen and Prout, 2002: 492–493). Instead, they suggest that ethical strategies like that of ethical symmetry, which states that the rights, feelings, and interests of children should be given as much consideration as those of adults, might provide a basis for the tactics researchers use to resolve ethical dilemmas (Christensen and Prout, 2002: 493).⁸ This article proposes that in addition to a strategy of ethical symmetry, a strategy of minimizing social distance enables the researcher to identify the culturally and contextually specific rights, feelings, and interests of children. Hence, in my own research, employing a strategy of minimizing social distance facilitated an ethical stance toward adults, children, and cultural communities, because I came to understand difference through relationship and inhabit culturally appropriate roles over the course of research.

Conclusion

In this article, I suggest that anthropologists might work toward rethinking ethical orientations with children from the “ground up,” so to speak, by clarifying our own particular methodological strengths, given our unique and storied history doing participatory research with diverse groups of people quite unlike ourselves (Lederman, 2013). I do this in three steps. First, I situate the ethical strategy of minimizing social difference between researchers and children within contemporary debates about participatory research with children. I argue that strategies of minimizing social difference focus on policing and diminishing differences between researchers and children, but in so doing often reify these differences as universal and static, rather than recognize their local and dynamic qualities.

In contrast, I offer an alternative ethical strategy of minimizing social distance between researchers and children informed by my fieldwork and anthropological methods. I suggest that a strategy of minimizing social distance involve the suspension of control on the part of the researcher, which allows for the greater apprehension of the social rules of the community, enabling the researcher’s relations to inform understandings of contextually specific social difference. This strategy differs from that of minimizing social difference, which inevitably presumes control to be located in the researcher and the research design, and tends to reproduce understandings of difference from the perspective of the researcher rather than the informant or the child.

While ethical strategies such as minimizing social distance may be challenging to apply to cross-disciplinary research contexts, I am convinced that given the persistent and widespread interest toward reflexivity as an ethical research strategy (Davis, 1998; Komulainen, 2007; Punch, 2002), careful examination of ethnographic methods with children serves to address theoretical, ethical, and practical concerns among scholars of children and childhood. My hope is that this article has taken a practical step in the direction of clarifying some of the methods, power differentials, and ethical dilemmas often obscured behind expansive terms such as “child-oriented,” “child-centered,” or even, “participatory” research (Gallacher and Gallagher, 2008; Holland et al., 2010; Hunleth, 2011). Methodological conversations across disciplines are yet another practice of working to minimize social distance, and one that I find important and promising toward effective participatory research with children.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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