Using Creative Approaches and Facilitating Remote Online Focus Groups With Children and Young People: Reflections, Recommendations and Practical Guidance

Abstract

The importance of engaging and involving children and young people (CYP) in research is widely recognised, especially for educational research exploring CYP’s perceptions and experiences of school processes. Historically, working with CYP to collect qualitative data has involved face-to-face interactions, however the social distancing requirement during the COVID-19 pandemic meant there was a need to move ‘online’ and work ‘remotely’. In this paper we share our experiences of undertaking remote online synchronous focus groups with CYP and discuss how we overcame the challenges associated with conducting qualitative research with CYP ‘from a distance’. We used remote online synchronous focus groups to explore CYP’s perspectives on how education settings can support social, emotional, and mental wellbeing. We reflect on approaches used to uphold rigour and quality, and work ethically and sensitively. We have organised this into five topics reflecting distinct parts of the planning, design and practice: 1) working with CYP as research advisors to shape the design, feasibility and suitability of the methods and approach; 2) developing creative approaches within the online focus groups to increase engagement and inclusion; 3) considering logistical and technical practice; 4) considering ethical practice underpinning online group data collection with CYP; and 5) valuing participation and disseminate findings when working from a distance with participants. We present reflections and guidance for other researchers considering the use of remote online synchronous focus groups with CYP, as a feasible and valuable means for collecting data in both a time- and cost-effective manner.

‘It's scary starting a new school’: Children and young people's perspectives on wellbeing support during educational transitions

“…Our original analysis for NICE was organized deductively under specific topic areas of their interest; here, we instead reviewed, and organized codes and themes more inductively. Throughout analysis, and as mentioned in Hennessey et al 2021, it was apparent that transitions and 'getting them right' were of importance to participants; this paper represents our commitment to focus in depth on this topic.…”

“…We consulted with 10 children and young people who helped us develop meaningful and engaging methods, specifically, our use of creative methods, strategies for engaging via videoconferencing software and managing the presence of setting staff. A detailed overview of our design and methods is available in Hennessey et al (2022).…”

“…Thus, the study complements wider literature presenting direct experiences of transition and support, offering a more aspirational exploration from children and young people on how educators could support wellbeing during transitions generally. We have reported our findings for NICE (Hennessey et al, 2021); here, we revisit and explore our analysis for an academic audience, offering a more focussed account of themes and greater attention to theoretical implications, alongside key issues for wider policy and practice.…”

“…However, specificity is valuable, and we seek to complement that literature while emphasizing a need for further investigation into particular transitions (particularly beyond the primary-secondary transition), to understand convergences and divergences. We point to methodological strengths including our use of creative methods to facilitate in-depth discussion, our engagement with children and young people in designing data generation approaches, and adoption of open science principles and practices, in that we have made available all data generation resources via the OSF (https://doi.org/10.17605/ OSF.IO/R6NVW), our reflections on the data generation process (Hennessey et al, 2022) and our codes underpinning the current analysis (see Supplementary Materials). Finally, we highlight that transitions formed only part of our overall discussions, which focussed on various aspects of education-based wellbeing provision, and thus, data are limited in scope and depth; we encourage ongoing, in-depth exploration across and within transitions with those from seldom heard groups to continue to advance understanding.…”

Perspectives of youth in Ireland on school-based mental health and suicide prevention: the MYSTORY study

“…Our findings draw attention to young people’s awareness of their lack of and desire for young people’s voice and meaningful involvement in school mental health interventions and student consultation spaces. Previous research also demonstrates that young people perceive youth voice as central to school mental health ( Hennessey et al , 2022 ), but schools do not consult with young people to understand their perspectives on school mental health ( Marinucci et al , 2022 ). What is unique to our study is the perceptions that: (i) mental health interventions and consultation spaces lack and need meaningful involvement and voice of young people, and (ii) young people’s involvement and voice may not result in meaningful change in school mental health, given their lack of agency in the school environment.…”