This paper considers what is problematic in research that is characterized as a partnership between children or young people and researchers in order to foreground child ‘voice’. It looks for ways to conceptualise perspectives of children and young people, and their involvement in research. This exploration ensued as a result of a small, funded research project that asked young people to talk about what they understood psychology to be about. One of the most common research ‘partnerships’ in educational research is that between children and researchers. However, there seems to be a wide variety of research that is identified by the authors as representing ‘partnership’: from asking pupils their views to engaging children and young people in more participative action research (Kellett, 2005). Over the last 10 years there has been more and more research incorporating child views and, more recently, research where children help to carry out the research (Todd, 2007). There is an absence of methodological critique in the large proportion of the published reports of such research. The problematic in voice is now being increasingly recognized (Arnot & Reay, 2007). That research is a contested and constructed site muddies any ‘taking voce at face value’ (James, 2007). So how are we to conceptualise ‘research partnerships’ with young people? This paper considers some of the main problems with ‘voice research. This involves critically engaging with different kinds of knowledge as well as understandings of capital. The neo-liberal education context in which voice research and practice takes place risks co-opting children further into ‘responsibilisation’ and ‘consumerism’. Most conceptual tools to assist voice research – such as linear models of the involvement of children – fails to engage with critique and, rather than enabling partnership, there is a risk of disempowering children even further. This paper offers a number of ways to think about voice research that – thankfully for those of us committed to such approaches - enable it to continue. A number of possibilities are offered for voice research that critically conceptualise the knowledge that is possible but also consider the positioning of children and young people in different kinds of research contexts. In doing so our understanding of the meaning of ‘research partnerships’ with respect to children and young people is developed further.

The project involved two separate consultation approaches with different groups of young people in different contexts asking them their perspectives on what they thought psychology to be about. As a psychologist, with a subject (psychology) that has often objectified children and had a strong influence on children’s lives, I was interested in giving children the opportunity to comment on the discipline, and perhaps even help to shape it. In each of the two research situations the young people and, ourselves, the HEI researchers, occupied very different positions. In one, the context was a school context and the young people were those studying psychology ‘A level’. In the other a diverse group of young people (including those studying ‘A level’) were in a non-school context and had greater agency in the research process. Activity systems analysis assisted in developing understandings about the different research contexts.

In the first research context, the ideas about psychology that emerged showed a strong resemblance to the ‘A level’ curriculum, and it seemed to be very difficult to disengage from this as a model for what constitutes psychology. This led to critical reflections on the context within which young people are consulted for the purpose of research and led to a second consultation process in which young people had greater agency over the research. The second set of outcomes – the discussions and the recorded ideas – were wide-ranging and seemed to contribute to a debate about what psychology is rather than reproduce a current curriculum. It seemed to the researcher that there were important aspects of the second context that encouraged collaboration – something more approaching partnership - and placed young people in a position that they could explore and develop their own perspectives on psychology.