Africa-Press – Botswana. Adults think we know what is best for children. We have responsibility for them – feeding them, clothing them, educating them, protecting them, loving them – but we also assume rights over them, and on their behalf. Adults make rules (including laws and policies) about what children can and cannot do. We expect children to behave according to our rules.
It’s also the case that when researchers are trying to better understand children’s needs and well-being, we usually do not ask the children themselves. Instead, we ask their parents or adult relatives, or their teachers, for evaluations.
There are good reasons why survey teams do not talk to children, even older children who have a strong understanding of questions, starting about age 10-12. Children are considered vulnerable because they are dependent on the adults in their lives. If an adult heard a child talking to a researcher, perhaps saying something the adult did not like, the child could be punished.
Alternatively, the child might not be honest if others were listening. Survey interviews tend to be conducted in places where there are other adults who are interested and listening. Privacy may be impossible. And even if it were possible, who would let their young daughter talk alone to a stranger?
Our recent research has sought to overcome these barriers to better understanding of children’s authentic perspectives. We have studied the work and schooling of children in low-income countries – such as Tanzania – and looked to develop research methodologies appropriate for children and youth around the world, testing the approach in Tanzania, Nepal and Brazil.
Two findings stand out. First, there is much to learn from children and the choices they make. Second, innovative survey methods – such as our use of cartoon stories – have potential to survey child-respondents in large household surveys. Researchers and policy makers could learn directly from children and rely less on adult proxy respondents, resulting in more effective policies and programmes.
Children’s views about chores
While using proxy respondents is appropriate for very young children or for questions likely beyond children’s knowledge, it is less clear that it is better for older children (ages 10-17) and topics within their experience.
Several arguments can be made that children could provide better or equally valid information on their activities than proxy respondents, as Levison and collaborators – economist Deborah S. DeGraff and demographer Esther Dungumaro – explored in Tanzania.
Parallel questions were asked of children aged 10-17 and proxy respondents about those children. We were interested in environmental chores: fetching water and collecting firewood for the family’s use.
We asked the mothers survey questions about their children, then we asked the children and adolescents some of the same questions. Of course, ethics rules required that we get permission (“consent”) from mothers before talking to children, and we also asked permission from children (“assent”) to engage with them. When a field researcher interviewed a child, the pair sat nearby, often under a tree, where adults could see them but not hear them.
The aim was to find out whether older children could provide better or equally valid information about some of the chores they did, as compared to information from their mothers.
When mothers and children were asked about the time that children spent fetching water and collecting firewood, some differences emerged. The biggest differences were seen when water or wood were scarce, when mothers had many young children, and when mothers had little education.
Some large differences may indicate that the amount of work done by children is highly underestimated by the adults it benefits. An important earlier study in Zimbabwe that used different ways of studying children’s work, including following children around, showed this pattern. We argued a case for collecting data directly from children who are developmentally able to understand survey questions, starting from about ages 10-12.
Given these differences in the time spent on chores as reported by mothers and children in the study above, researchers must be thoughtful about who is reporting information if they want to collect and report on accurate data.
Cartoon stories
Policy makers sometimes pay more attention to information from big surveys that ask questions of thousands of households and adults.
In our joint research, we wondered if there were ways to include children as survey respondents, rather than relying only on what adults said about them. Older children and adolescents do have opinions, and sometimes they are not what adults might expect. Why not learn directly from them?
Based on previous studies, we identified topics that could be difficult and upsetting for young people in Tanzania, where learning from kids could give researchers a different perspective than asking adults. In order to understand the perspectives of children, we developed short cartoon stories that children watched on tablet computers. Vignettes have been growing in popularity as a research tool in qualitative and quantitative methods, and research has validated the method when respondents are children and adolescents.
We sought to overcome the barriers in these ways:
The cartoons included still images and animated video clips that were designed to avoid cultural, ethnic or wealth indicators such as hairstyles, clothing, or facial features.
To be sensitive to privacy, children listened to the story being narrated in Swahili through headsets.
Because the stories were watched over tablets with headphones, nearby listeners would not have the context for the story even if they overheard anything.
One story was about a student who is running late to school because of morning domestic chores.Upon arriving, the boy or girl (matched to the sex of the interviewed child) is punished by the teacher. The video shows several possible but imperfect things the cartoon child could do, such as getting up earlier or skipping school.
Child respondents were then asked to give their opinion on different options, pointing to smiley or sad/angry faces, then answering other questions about how the challenge could be resolved. This allowed us to capture child perspectives quantitatively without directly speaking about the topic out loud or asking if children had similar experiences. We aimed to reduce their vulnerability to punishment or embarrassment, especially on taboo or sensitive subjects.
Many social scientists have demonstrated that children, even young children, are people who make choices within whatever limits they cannot change – they “have agency”.
Our findings from the cartoon stories show a wide range of perspectives about how children think about improving their wellbeing and the wellbeing of other children in their communities. If this cartoon vignette methodology were scaled up to include child-respondents in large household surveys, researchers and policy makers could learn directly from children and rely less on adult proxy-respondents, which might result in more effective policies and programmes.
theconversation
