Handbook of Social Work Research with Children and Young People

This Handbook offers a rich insight into social work research with children and young people in diverse geographical and practice contexts. Using first hand, lively examples from research projects, it highlights the complex challenges faced when researching with children and outlines practices which foster respectful, ethical and productive research relationships.

Leading experts emphasise the importance of recognising children’s agency, stressing how vital it is to treat young people as human beings in their own right. They highlight the challenging power dynamics between the researcher and child, exploring how researchers can create conditions which cede power to young people across a project’s continuum and practice reciprocity in engagement and reflectivity. The Handbook advocates for creative research methods and the development of specific research competency in establishing sensitive and reflexive research relationships.

International in scope, this Handbook is an essential guide for scholars and students broadly in the social sciences and especially in the disciplines of social work, sociology, social policy and development studies. Social workers, psychologists and policymakers will likewise benefit from its detailed approach to establishing ethical working relationships with children and young people.