Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Do No Online Harm: Balancing Safeguarding with Researchers and Participants in Online Research with Sensitive Populations
- 2 The Ethical Challenges of Researching Sexting with Children and Adolescents
- 3 Responding Reflexively, Relationally, and Reciprocally to Unequal Childhoods
- 4 Researching Children’s Experiences in a Conflict Zone and a Red-light Area: Conducting Ethnographic Fieldwork in India and Kashmir
- 5 Capturing Narratives: Adopting a Reflexive Approach to Research with Disabled Young People
- 6 Youth Social Action: Shaping Communities, Driving Change
- 7 A New Panorama of Child Voice in the Child Protection Context
- 8 A Bump on the Head in the Graveyard: Palimpsests of Death, Selves, Care, and Touch
- 9 Owning Our Mistakes: Confessions of an Unethical Researcher
- Index
5 - Capturing Narratives: Adopting a Reflexive Approach to Research with Disabled Young People
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2024
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Do No Online Harm: Balancing Safeguarding with Researchers and Participants in Online Research with Sensitive Populations
- 2 The Ethical Challenges of Researching Sexting with Children and Adolescents
- 3 Responding Reflexively, Relationally, and Reciprocally to Unequal Childhoods
- 4 Researching Children’s Experiences in a Conflict Zone and a Red-light Area: Conducting Ethnographic Fieldwork in India and Kashmir
- 5 Capturing Narratives: Adopting a Reflexive Approach to Research with Disabled Young People
- 6 Youth Social Action: Shaping Communities, Driving Change
- 7 A New Panorama of Child Voice in the Child Protection Context
- 8 A Bump on the Head in the Graveyard: Palimpsests of Death, Selves, Care, and Touch
- 9 Owning Our Mistakes: Confessions of an Unethical Researcher
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Historically, notions of disability have been underpinned by administrative measures, diagnostic categories, and traditional practices within regulated systems. Knowledge generated within disciplines such as medical sociology, philosophy, and psychology have shaped our knowledge and understanding of disability and impairment (Richards and Clark, 2018). Categories of disability and normality emerged through these disciplines, resulting in the separation of what constitutes normal/abnormal, typical/atypical. This academic and medical knowledge has informed social perceptions and understanding, resulting in the separation, marginalisation, and ‘othering’ of people with disabilities. Thanks, in part, to political campaigns and academic activism, which called for greater equality and rights for the disabled, these perceptions and categorisations have been challenged, and a more critical, flexible, and interdisciplinary perspective of disability has emerged (Goodley, 2017). Disabled people’s experiences, views, and opinions have begun to be incorporated into policymaking, practice, research, and academic literature, engendering a more inclusive perspective, and one that values diversity and difference.
Notwithstanding these changes, there is clearly some way to go before inclusion and acceptance become commonplace, and it remains notable that the position of disabled young people within research and academic literature remains marginalised (Shakespeare and Watson, 1997; 2001). This absence is evident in the lack of first-person accounts from disabled young people themselves, researchers possibly preferring to talk on their behalf. What is at the root of this exclusion? Perhaps assumptions of vulnerability and incompetence, which are so engrained in our everyday thinking that we assume such voices are too difficult to hear or even understand (Boggis, 2018). Conceivably there has been a deficit in the skills required to gather non-normative voices, and to subsequently navigate the academic barriers to including them in published works.
However, excluding populations from research and favouring voices that are easily sought or heard is highly problematic as it fails to recognise diversity, and limits our soundscapes (Richards et al, 2015). Therefore, we strongly believe it is no longer acceptable to exclude voices simply because they pose challenges to us as researchers, and the methods we use.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Critical Perspectives on Research with ChildrenReflexivity, Methodology, and Researcher Identity, pp. 82 - 95Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2023