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This chapter explores the ethical dilemmas that emerged in situ from an ethnographic study in collaboration with Latin American children and youngsters. It was developed in the challenging conditions of isolation and lockdown, during the COVID-19 pandemic. In such times, a group of eight researchers from different geographical locations in the Americas looked into the ways children reorganise, reconstruct and reinterpret their daily lives in social isolation. The methodological approach, which enabled dialogue and conversation, began through a system of correspondence – in oral, written, recorded, drawn, photographed and audiovisual forms – among Latin American children. The expectations about the viability of this fieldwork modality brought, from the beginning, ethical challenges that required continuous adjustments, agreements, rectifications, adaptations and explicit reflection on such ethical aspects. Here we focus on three challenges that we analyse individually, although in practice they were interconnected. The first one was the dilemma regarding perception and use of time. The second ethical challenge is based on the fact that we recruited the young participants through friendships and kinship networks that each of the eight researchers previously had. The third challenge was connected to the decision to communicate through letters (a markedly confessional, private and intimate epistolary genre) that were both intervened by our ‘special’ position and also taken as ethnographic documents. In our fieldwork, in the specific spatial and temporal situations we worked, we understand the self as emerging from intersubjectivity and knowledge relations as co-created between researcher and researched. Thus, ethical decisions are made during the research process itself and, for us, in situ ethics entails a reciprocal commitment, between children, youth and adults as co-researchers, to adjust themselves to the developments and boundaries of the ethnographic field. This also allowed the participants to manage the adjustments in this specific and situated context that circumscribed everybody, seeking answers in conversations and paying careful attention to the situation.

This study aimed to develop and test the impact of a social media-based intervention for improving the business skills and income of young smallholder farmers.

First, the researchers used an exploratory approach to develop a social media-based intervention for acquiring business skills and improving income. Second, the researchers tested the effectiveness of the developed programme on a sample of 506 young smallholder farmers. Finally, the intervention and data collection took place over five years (2017–2021).

The result showed steady improvements in business skills and income from 2017 to 2021 for the treatment group, unlike the control group. Also, improvements in business skills led to a reduction in expenses and an increase in profit from 2017 to 2021. A further evaluation of the result showed that an addition of 5.1 mean scores in business skills led to the addition of $91 income between 2017 and 2018; for 2018–2019, 2.6 improvements in business skills increased income by $123. For 2019–2020, a 2.7 improvement increased income by $209, whilst for 2020–2021, a 1.6 improvement increased income by $320.

The results of this study could help explore ways of using social media to change behaviour aimed at improving income amongst young smallholder farmers.

This paper aims to provide reflective practice insights on the use of the participatory approaches of World Café and Forum Theatre as crime prevention education and research tools with young people and young adults through a social learning theory lens.

Four independent case-studies showcase World Café and Forum Theatre methodology. World Café events investigated new psychoactive substances (NPS) awareness with young hostel users and college pupils (N = 22) and race hate crime with school and college pupils (N = 57). Forum Theatre events explored loan shark crime with college and university students (N = 46) and domestic abuse crime with young hostel users and college and university students (N = 28). Anonymous survey data produced qualitative and descriptive statistical data.

Learning impacts from participatory crime prevention education and research events were evidenced. Participatory approaches were perceived positively, although large group discussion-based methodologies may not suit all young people or all criminological topics.

Participatory approaches of World Café and Forum Theatre are vehicles for social learning and crime prevention with young people and young adults; eliciting crime victimisation data; and generating personal solutions alongside wider policy and practice improvement suggestions. Whilst World Café elicited greater lived experience accounts providing peer-level social learning, Forum Theatre provided crucial visual role modelling for communicating safeguarding messages.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a novel strategy for building research capability in a young university with an emerging research culture. Investment in building research capacity is essential for universities to remain competitive, but one of the challenges for younger universities is developing the research capability of individuals in an emerging research culture.

To gain a better understanding of how leading researchers become research leaders and how universities can design strategies to attract, retain, develop and promote researchers, we carried out a study of 30 research leaders in Australia. We then designed and implemented a cohort-based career development programme for early career researchers.

From our research, and the programme we developed, we have found that developing early career researchers does not mean teaching them how to do research – it means teaching them how to build a track record, which can lead to a research career. A development programme for early career researchers is a short-term investment for longer-term returns, but these programmes do have immediate impact on research productivity for the individual researchers and for the organisation.

We consider the success of the Early Career Researchers Programme is due to the regular face to face workshops, the development of the research career plan and the supportive research environment provided by the me.

The investment in this programme clearly demonstrates the value of researcher development on research outputs and research careers. These methods could be applied to researcher development training programmes elsewhere.

Qualitative researchers working with young people consistently face challenges in trying to ethically gain insight into their inner thoughts and worlds. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the use of generative tools in conjunction with qualitative interviewing with young people can enhance creativity and reflexivity, while mitigating adult-child power dynamics.

This paper draws upon ethnographic research conducted by the author examining the interplay between emotion, communication, and schooling at a public high school. Participant observation, use of generative tools to make collages representing each student’s experience, and in-depth interviews guided by the student-created visuals were triangulated to more fully understand the students’ experiences.

Generative tools foster reflexivity in both researcher and participants, lesson adult-child power dynamic concerns, and foster creativity without the requirement of drawing ability. Integrating the collaging process into in-depth interviews enabled students to privilege their primary thoughts, experiences, and concerns related to the issues being studied, mitigating concerns over adults overpowering and controlling the focus of the interview.

Generative tools can complement and enhance time-honored qualitative methods to alleviate ongoing concerns about ethical and accurate research with young people. Researchers are encouraged to embrace creative methods to engage young people in ethical and thoughtful reflection on and sharing of their experiences. Creative methods are also useful in empowering young people to imagine their world otherwise creating new possibilities for the future.

In this chapter, I focus on two methodological issues involved with conducting ethnographies of very young children; establishing a researcher role in preschool classrooms while simultaneously gaining access into children’s culture and the trust of adult gatekeepers involved (i.e., teachers). Drawing on my participant observation experiences in 10 preschool classrooms (over 470 hours and 19 months of observations), I challenge the use of the friend role (Fine & Sandstrom, 1988) and least-adult role (Mandell, 1988) in research with young children. I examine how teachers mediate the researcher’s role in participant observation of children in preschool classrooms demonstrating the importance of establishing a middle manager role between teachers and children when conducting participant observations. I also discuss strategies used to overcome adult’s mediation of the researcher’s role, and strategies for simultaneously gaining teachers and children’s rapport in participant observation research in ways that formulate positive relationships with adults and children. I demonstrate the importance of researcher reflexivity of children’s and adults’ assessments of researchers’ roles in the field, highlighting how researchers’ impacts on children are not dependent on the times they are present in the field. Instead, I show that children continue to critically assess researchers’ positionality and roles in the field, often times seeking the help of adults (i.e., parents and teachers), further stressing the need for researchers to negotiate an understanding of their roles with both adults and children prior to and while in the field.

The topic of parent migration and its effects on the family environment has become a focus of moral dilemmas in East Europe for the last three decades. Children have been portrayed as social orphans and parents working abroad as neglectful parents. Today, with more evidence from research and experience, the impact of parental migration is much more comprehensive and nuanced, recognising its noxious or even harmful but also possibly empowering effects. This chapter reflects on the involvement of left-behind adolescents as co-researchers in a study of transnational families. It acknowledges the agentic role of children (often automatically labelled as victims of neglect), amplifies their voices to inform existing data on the impact of parents' departure to work abroad and identifies directions for intervention that might strengthen families.

The research is an integral part of CASTLE – Children Left Behind by Labour Migration, an ongoing project (June 2021–December 2023). ¹ This chapter presents the research collaboration experience with 12 co-researcher adolescents with previous left-behind experiences, originating from Moldova and currently residing in Romania. The co-researchers participated in all stages of the research process: training, design of data collection, recruitment of research participants, data analysis and dissemination of results. Taking co-researcher roles had an empowering effect on adolescents, who learnt how to express their views on the topic, voiced their experiences about the emotional costs of being left behind by their parents and reflected on sensitive issues like separation of family members and violence in the family.

The story of youth mental health remains poorly understood. To truly progress our understanding of youth mental health, we must shift our focus from one in which young people are the subjects, or “characters”, of research efforts to one in which they are active agents, or “authors”. This change in dynamic falls under the banner of public and patient involvement (PPI), a growing movement that emphasises the meaningful involvement of the public in health research. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Here, the authors aim to stimulate this shift in focus by describing emerging practices of youth involvement in paediatric research and outlining how such practices can be extended to the domain of youth mental health. In particular, the authors highlight Young Persons’ Advisory Groups (YPAG), through which young people can be involved in an active, meaningful and mutually beneficial manner, at each step in the research life cycle.

A YPAG comprises young people who act as research partners, providing guidance on a range of activities. In the health domain, YPAGs have provided fresh perspectives, generated valuable knowledge and changed attitudes about youth involvement in research. Moreover, they provide young people with genuine opportunities to shape research so that it addresses issues they encounter in their everyday lives.

The establishment of youth mental health YPAGs will enhance the authors’ research questions, design, delivery and impact. The authors outline how researchers can embrace PPI and work together with young people to tell a different story of youth mental health.

This study seeks to explore the union perspective of a group of unionized young Canadian teachers to understand their belief system about trade unionism.

The methodology used herein consists of collecting and examining the interview data of participants (n = 37) through the theoretical lens of radical perspective.

The findings suggest that participants positively associate unionism with bargaining for their special interests, providing professional development services and opportunities for professional socialization. But this pluralist perspective has not translated into an engagement in the union life.

So far, the findings of this study cannot be generalized to the whole population of Canadian young teachers because the participants’ sample size is not large enough. In consideration of this limitation, unions need to survey the union opinions of their young rank and file members at a large scale to draw a clear understanding of the needs of these members to adequately adjust their renewal and revitalization strategies to those needs.

The findings of this study are significant because the intersection between young teachers and organized labor is underresearched in Canada.

The purpose of this paper is to examine researchers’ motivations to publish by comparing different career stages (PhD students; temporarily employed postdocs/new professors; scholars with permanent employment) with regard to epistemic, pragmatic, and personal motives.

This qualitative analysis is mainly based on semi-structured narrative interviews with 91 researchers in the humanities, social, and natural sciences, based at six renowned (anonymous) universities in Germany, the UK, and the USA. These narratives contain answers to the direct question “why do you publish?” as well as remarks on motivations to publish in relation to other questions and themes. The interdisciplinary interpretation is based on both sociological science studies and philosophy of science in practice.

At each career stage, epistemic, pragmatic, and personal motivations to publish are weighed differently. Confirming earlier studies, the authors find that PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in temporary positions mainly feel pressured to publish for career-related reasons. However, across status groups, researchers also want to publish in order to support collective knowledge generation.

The sample of interviewees may be biased toward those interested in reflecting on their day-to-day work.

Continuous and collective reflection is imperative for preventing uncritical internalization of pragmatic reasons to publish. Creating occasions for reflection is a task not only of researchers themselves, but also of administrators, funders, and other stakeholders.

Most studies have illuminated how researchers publish while adapting to or growing into the contemporary publish-or-perish culture. This paper addresses the rarely asked question why researchers publish at all.