ABSTRACT
Most of the guidance on researching children within ethical frameworks presumes children to be an ‘identifiable, knowable constituency whose members share particular characteristics that distinguish them from others’ (Halsey and Honey, 2005: 2144). Yet the constructions and discourses of childhood posit a distinct challenge to their knowability and characteristics other than in relation to adults. This relational definition or understanding of childhood permeates dominant cultural, legal and political constructions of childhood through paradigms of dependence, vulnerability, immaturity (moral/physical/cognitive) (Morrow and Richards, 1996) and in turn have shaped the ethical frameworks of social research with children which will be discussed below.
