Consent by the Children

2.3 ETHICS

Researching my own grandchildren presented some challenging ethical issues about informed consent, about the kind of knowledge I was seeking and the validity of my findings.

2.3.1 Consent by the Children

Hughes and Helling confidently state that “of course, the developmental level of the subjects places limitations on the child’s understanding. Infants and toddlers (birth-2.5 years) cannot give their consent. The child’s cognitive and language limitations make it necessary for researchers to rely only on proxy consent from parents or legal guardians” (Hughes and Helling 1991, p228).

While the Piagetian developmental model on which they were drawing had already been challenged (for example by Donaldson 1978), the fact remains that the extensive literature on the ethics of research with young children – which frequently cites Article 12 of the UN

Convention on the Rights of the Child (eg Lansdown 2005) – rarely deals with children under the age of three. Alderson reflects this in saying that children aged three may be competent to consent (Alderson 2004, p 107) and Paglaiogou states that it is “difficult or almost impossible for [toddlers who as yet lack the development of language] to evaluate for themselves what

participation in the research will mean for them” (Palaiologou 2012, Chapter 2, p2).

Connie and Alfie were 1;10 years old when my research formally began, and were clearly not mature enough for me to try and obtain their consent to participate simply by asking them.

Einarsdottir’s study of two-to-six year olds in a playgroup setting offers useful reflections on consent by the youngest children of her sample:

The children didn’t give their consent through formal means at the onset of the study;

rather, they were asked each time they began activities connected to the study if they wanted to participate. The reason for this procedure was that the researchers believed this to be the best way. In other words, since the participating children were very young, it would be easier for them to decide each time if they wanted to participate. If the children were to give consent only in the beginning, they might not have understood what it meant, and they could also have forgotten it later. In retrospect, I have been wondering if this was the most appropriate method and if I shouldn’t have introduced the study for the children in the beginning. If one does not introduce a study as a whole to the participants there is a danger that they feel they have been tricked into

participating. However, with children so young, one has to consider very carefully how an introduction to the study could be approached in a constructive and useful way so it would have meaning for the children. (Einarsdottir 2007, p205)

This was effectively the procedure I followed, although the fact that I am the children’s grandmother and was researching in home settings, meant that it happened even more

informally. Before they could talk, the children’s consent about participation in movie-watching was implicitly already secured, as part of an established bedtime ritual, for the In the Night Garden viewings in October and November of the same year and for the Eric Carle films between January and March 2012 (see Sections 3.2 and 3.3). By May 2012, when they were aged 2;5, their arguments with each other about what to watch had to be tactfully negotiated (or, failing that, arbitrated), but the question of whether they were going to watch anything never needed to be addressed, and if they found that they weren’t interested in what was being shown, they would walk away and do something else. The exceptions to this were when I introduced something different from what they were used to (see Section 2.4.6), when I would announce that I was going to show them something new, that they might like. This mirrored Phoebe’s own practice: trying out new things with them and accepting their responses:

…with Babar,⁵ they were looking at it very intently for kind of ten minutes and then they were like “don’t like this, turn it off”. They give it a chance, like “ok, what’s it going to do?” it’s not like kind of two seconds “no I don’t like it”, they will watch something for a good 10 to 15 minutes and then “no this isn’t going anywhere that I like, turn it off now.”

(Phoebe, Interview on 12^th April 2012)

5 This was Babar King of the Elephants, an animated feature film by Nelvana Ltd and Astral Films, released theatrically by Alliance Films and direct to video by New Line Cinema in 1998.

However, there was also a sense in which the children were conscripted into participating, in that I regularly filmed them watching movies without announcing that I was doing so, or asking them whether they minded. They indicated little awareness of being filmed or photographed at age 1;9 when I began to try videoing them: as 21^st century children, this was something they were very used to. For example in one of the early “trial videos” I made, of Alfie watching a TV mounted high on the wall of the John Lewis shoe department, Alfie twice seems to look at the camera, in each case as part of a quick glance towards me in response to my comments, (see Figure 2.2) but he soon walked away to investigate more accessible, and interesting, features of the shop.

Figure 2.2: Alfie (aged 1;9) notices me filming him in John Lewis shoe department

In later months, when he wasn’t interested in watching what was on the TV, Alfie would occasionally approach me to try and take the iPhone in order to play with it: something I would negotiate by inviting him to look at the images on the screen, eg “look, I’m filming Connie!” and if necessary resist his attempts to snatch by declaring that “this is my toy”. Connie rarely noticed my filming, or responded to it, even when, on one warm afternoon in October 2012, I fell asleep while filming and dropped the iPhone.

I was therefore operating a form of what Flewitt calls “provisional consent” (Flewitt 2005, p556), in which I would use explanations such as “I’m writing a book about you” or “it’s about the ways you watch TV” when they asked what I was doing when making notes. They never asked for further explanations of these statements: genuine, enthusiastic adult interest in what they were doing was a normal part of their experience. Neither of them ever objected to my filming them;

Connie did on one occasion object to my asking questions, but this was because she wanted to

go on watching the film, though Alfie was keen to answer them, albeit in a highly playful manner (see Section 3.4.3). If the children had objected to my videoing them, I would have had to terminate the project.

I did consider showing the children some of my videos during the fieldwork phase (2011 – 2013), but these were then only viewable on a small, elderly MacBook (see Section 2.5.2): the images and sound were unimpressive, and I anticipated that playing with the unfamiliar laptop itself would be a more irresistible attraction than watching the videos, given that they were often shown videos of themselves anyway. Occasionally, one or other of them would look at the iPhone screen as I was filming, and watch the other for a few moments, but this never

interested them for long. In October 2012 I tried “interviewing” Alfie using the reverse screen on the iPhone so that he could see himself: this was very successful for about two minutes until

“seeing myself on the screen” became a bone of contention between the two of them (see Section 2.4.2). In 2015, when the children were five, I had acquired a large-screen iMac and started showing them some of my videos on this: it was like the computer they had at home and therefore not something new that they needed to investigate. They found the videos greatly amusing and fascinating, and thus to some extent became actively engaged with the research (Harcourt 2011, p335): for example, Connie offered her own interpretation of her behaviour as a 17-month-old in the “Pontipine Moustache” episode (see Section 4.2.1), suggesting that she had thought the flying moustache was a bat. However, comments that depend on children’s

memories of when they were less than two are hard to validate: it is difficult to know whether Connie actually remembered what she saw at the time, or imposed her own later interpretation.