All safe and meaningful participatory research requires careful thought and planning – particularly in the context of subject matter considered sensitive. Key aspects of the planning stage will involve: thinking about children and young people’s potential roles and influence in the process; considering the available resources; identifying if and how participatory activities link to the wider context of research, policy development or practice; and considering how to support children and young people’s safety and wellbeing.
While we recognise that participation need to be flexible and responsive to children and young people’s emerging ideas, planning can provide a strong foundation to support effective working and help researchers, facilitators and children and young people feel safe within the process. Planning can help us to manage risk, respond to emerging needs and ensure our work is sensitive and careful.
When circumstances allow, participatory practice can be embedded into the planning process from the start, by working collaboratively with potential partners such as young experts, frontline workers, potential participants, and/or family members to inform our research questions and approach. We share CAFADA’s learning from our expert advisory groups here along with some tools.
This stage may also be about developing a shared vision across different project stakeholders and partners and ensuring everyone understands what children and young people’s participation means in this context. Members of a research team may use the language of children and young people’s participation or participatory research in different ways. However, it is also important to ensure that on a project, which is committed to participation, that there is shared understanding of the aims, value and meaning of children and young people’s participation. A good starting point therefore might be delivering training for colleagues, or facilitating a reflective discussion about this – you might find our participatory research planning learning and tool useful.
This section shares some of the tools we used in CAFADA to support our planning processes and provide a foundation for safe working practices across a range of participation work, from more traditional fieldwork with ‘participants’ to ‘expert advisors’ at different stages of our research process. In addition, there are examples of tools we used to support the application of shared participation principles and frameworks across diverse settings.