ABSTRACT
Children’s meaningful participation in research should be supported by researchers, and materials and processes should be carefully crafted to meet the needs of individual children. Large and small groups of young children need to be provided with information that they can understand as part of the informed consent process to enable them to make informed, autonomous decisions. How the Narrative Approach can be adapted to meet the needs of young children, and how the approach can be adapted and applied to a diverse range of research projects, is discussed. This chapter takes a forward-looking approach and explores how the Narrative Approach could be used within various disciplines (for example, education, medicine,), for a range of people for (for example, the elderly, Indigenous peoples, those with disability or who have English as an additional language), and in various formats, (for example, a digitally distributed version for large cohorts of participants). Further insight into the practical application of the Narrative Approach is presented, highlighting some of the limitations that have been identified to date. Attention is drawn to the ability of the Narrative Approach to cross research boundaries, support children’s rights within main-stream research, and to be translated into contexts other than education. The chapter highlights the significance of the Narrative Approach in terms of upholding young children’s ‘right to be properly researched’, providing young children with ‘more voice’, and creating conceptual ethical spaces that can evolve according to the needs of the children in each context.
