Enhancing participatory research with young children through comic-illustrated ethnographic field notes

Abstract

Conducting research with young participants presents numerous challenges, particularly in terms of representation as the researcher endeavours to listen to children’s voices in order to understand and portray their perspectives accurately. Since the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of a Child established children have the right to express their views and have these taken seriously in matters that affect them, researchers have developed a variety of multimodal methods to capture the children’s perspectives. The aim of this paper is to describe an innovative methodological approach to recording ethnographic observations of young children (aged four to six) through a visual mode: the cartoon. The article describes the methodology of a specific research project that explored young children’s communicative practices in a super-diverse environment. Adopting a flexible approach to research and putting children’s suggestions into practice led to the co-production cartoons that used the participants’ self-portraits to visually portray the researcher’s written observations of the children. The paper presents vignettes, evidencing how the use of self-portraits meant the cartoons were more engaging, held greater personal significance and opened up spaces for dialogue, leading the researcher to uncover deeper insights. This has important implications for any research that endeavours to listen to the participants’ perspectives, but where verbal or written forms of communication are impeded.