Listening to Children's Voices: A Theoretical Understanding of Working with Children in Research

The past two to three decades have witnessed an increased involvement of children and youth as researchers and a flourishing of related methodologies. This has resulted in a shift in research ethos, where researchers are interested in working with children rather than on them. These new trends have partly been a consequence of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). The present paper provides a comprehensible theoretical distinction between doing psychology “on” and doing psychology “with” children. An approach of working with children values and credits their opinions, perceptions, evaluations, and aspirations, whereas working on children implicitly or explicitly adheres to a biologically focused stage-like developmental models in which children are not positioned as competent social actors. The paper elaborates on the philosophical, epistemological, methodological practices, and potential outcomes that characterize these two ways of doing psychology. The paper unpacks the theoretical understandings present in the work of philosophers such as Merelau-Ponty, Gadamer, Foucault, and Freire that can be adopted by researchers who aspire to work with children as active researchers.