Complexities of Researching with Young People

Currently, most books on youth research available on the market focus on 'how to' conduct youth research or the research process itself. This edited collection proposes to take this process a step further and discuss the complexities of youth research from a practical and theoretical context. In total, five themes are examined - conceptualising young people, ethics and consent, the digital, voice, participation and unexpected tensions. In this book, authors from six countries explore the complexities of researching with young people across disciplines and national contexts. Offering a closeup examination of their own research experiences, the authors address the complexities of researching with young people beyond simple questions of protection from harm and coercion by problematising notions of 'resilience', 'participation', 'risk' and 'voice'. This edited collection takes the reader through an exploration of its key themes and, in doing so, presents a cast of candid and insightful accounts from youth researchers situated within the humanities and social sciences.

Paulina Billett is a lecturer in sociology at La Trobe University, Victoria. Her research explores questions of wellbeing, identity formation and lived experience with a focus on women and young people. Matt Hart is a lecturer in digital society at the University of Leicester. His research interest is the sociology of youth and digital culture. Dona Martin is an adjunct researcher at La Trobe University, Bendigo, Victoria. Dona's portfolio includes a broad area of research in education.

1. Complexities of Researching with Young People: Conceptualising Key Issues; 2. Researching the Lives of Young Maori in Aotearoa New Zealand: Creating Culturally Sensitive Methods and Theory; 3. Doing Research in Organisations: Implications of the Different Definitions of Youth; 4. They Look Before They Leap: Conceptualising Young People as Digitally Competent Risk-Takers, and its Implications for Ethical Internet Research; 5. Critical Reflections: Merits of Using Youth-Centric Technology in Keeping Young People Safe Across Europe; 6. Digital Modes of Data Collection in Mixed-Methods Longitudinal Youth Research; 7. Revealing Intimacy through Digital Media: Young People, Digital Culture and New Research Perspectives; 8. Researching Young People's Experiences: An African-Centred Perspective of Consent and Ethics; 9. Working with Complexity: Between Control and Care in Digital Research Ethics; 10. Informed Consent as a Situated Research Process in an Ethnography of Incarcerated Youth in Denmark; 11. The Undue Burden of Methodological Warrant on the Voice of Disengaged Young People; 12. Critically Examining Participation, Power, Ethics, and the Co-construction of Knowledge in a Community-Based Photovoice Research Project with LGBTQ Former Foster Youth; 13. Participation, Positionality and Power: Critical Moments in Research with Service-Engaged Youth; 14. Participatory Research and Political Ecology: An Evaluation of Research with Young Syrian Refugees in Turkey; 15. Youth in Voice: The Concept of Voice; 16. How Contradictory Friendships Disrupted My Study of Working-Class Girls' Residential Instability; 17. The Multicultural Youth Australia Census: Reading Complexity and Migrant Youth Citizenship into Survey Methods; 18. The Pressures of Building Reciprocal Relationships in an Intergenerational Research Team.