Ethical Issues in Research with Children and Young People 2009

The survey focused on ethical issues in research involving children and youth, presenting questions to Finnish researchers on the ethical norms, consent issues, problematic situations, and ethical education and support received. Many questions were open-ended. The respondents were asked from whom or which body they had asked for ethics review, permission or consent for their research or with whom they had negotiated. Further questions covered whether they had asked for parental consent for research involving minors, whether the consent had been written, and what age the subjects were. The respondents were also asked whether they had been in a situation where the public authority responsible for the location where the survey took place had demanded parental consent, where ethical norms or administrative obstacles had proven to be conflicting and difficult to reconcile with their research interest, or where asking for parental consent or public authority clearance had had a negative impact on the representativeness of the study. If yes, the respondents were asked to describe the situations. One theme pertained to whether researchers had experienced situations that were problematic in terms of research ethics in research involving children and young people. The respondents were asked whether they had encountered such situations, what kind of situations they had been, what was the age of the subjects, and what the researcher had done to try to solve the problem. The survey also investigated what the respondents considered to be the key challenges in research involving children and young people in their own field. Finally, the respondents were asked whether they had received education or other support for ethical issues related to such a research, what kind of education/support they had received and what kind of education/support they would like to receive. Background variables included the respondent's gender, year of birth, duration of the research career, discipline, research method used, and type of work at the time of the survey.