Ethical issues and dilemmas in doing research with itinerant street vending children and young people: Experiences from Nigeria

Abstract

It has been widely acknowledged in recent years that contemporary ideas about children and childhoods are framed by perceptions and definitions that are both Western/ minority world and adult-centred. This paper argues that this is not only the case for theoretical concepts but is also found in research practice, and, in particular, in the commonly accepted ethical frameworks for conducting research with children and young people. Drawing from multi-sited fieldwork and a combined ethnographic methodology of participant observation and semi-structured interviews, this paper discusses the realities of conducting research with itinerant street vending children and young people in busy Nigerian streets and marketplaces in Enugu urban, who had never taken part in a research project. It explores five key ethical issues that arose from the study and reflects on the dilemmas involved with researching and relating with such a highly mobile group within a chaotic, yet organised market environment. The paper concludes that doing ethical research with children and young people in the developing world is fraught with issues and dilemmas that can best be resolved not by adopting textbook, 'Western' ethical research frameworks and constructions that do not reflect the lived realities of non-western children, but by constantly negotiating and renegotiating boundaries of inequalities, moral values, cultural beliefs and practices and specific contexts within which majority world children live and grow.

Developing an Evidence-base to Guide Ethical Action in Global Challenges Research in Complex and Fragile Contexts: A Scoping Review of the Literature

“…The first of these related to the challenge of building equal partnerships in the context of power differences between developed countries that finance research, and LMIC where the 'problems' to be solved are considered to exist (Coleman et al 2015;Gogognon and Godard 2015;Hunt, Gogognon, and Ridde 2014). The remaining two areas of concern related to positionality and possible role conflicts of the research team (objectivity of researchers) (Kiragu and Warrington 2013;Nuwagaba and Rule 2015;Pyles 2015), and risks for the research team (from physical riskfor example in war zones; to emotional burnout working with vulnerable population) (Chiumento et al 2016;Okoli 2015). Across these three areas, ethical dilemmas related to how the researchers' cultural / value biases potentially affect the way they approach the research and research participants; how to reconcile the role of (and in some research, the requirement for) the impartial objective researcher with a research context, and a research participant group experiencing vital need; and a concern with health and wellbeing of the research team in contexts of political instability, extreme deprivation, and potentially traumatising situations.…”