Reflecting on the challenging experience of involving children as peer researchers, this paper offers a critical examination of the tensions and contradictions faced by researchers committed to promoting the participation of children in research evaluation of services that affect them. The findings underpinning the paper are derived within a small-scale research study by the author evaluating the work of an emotional literacy project in two schools in the North West of England. The right to participation is articulated in international convention (UNCRC, 1989) and the statutory and non-statutory frameworks of many modern nation states. Nevertheless, it remains the case that children struggle for parity of status with adults and their voices are constrained by the persistence of adultism where adults act as primary interpreters of their lives. The current emphasis on ‘evidence based practice’ has tended to be driven by managerialist agendas and is dominated by the imperatives of positivism – a paradigm that I will argue is fundamentally unsympathetic to the exploration of voices, subjectivities and life worlds and reduces the potential for children to be taken seriously as active researchers of their own lives (Coppock, 2005). The paper is informed by theoretical and epistemological insights from both feminism and the sociology of childhood and challenges the construction of children as ‘vulnerable’, incompetent and unreliable in the research context. The idea of children as research ‘subjects’ and (more controversially) as researchers themselves, is invariably greeted with at best scepticism but more likely derision. These objections are derived within the social construction of childhood where many of the beliefs and stereotypes surrounding children confirm, legitimise and perpetuate their powerlessness by asserting their incapacity (Alderson and Morrow, 2004; James, Jenks and Prout, 1998). There is a striking parallel between the social construction of childhood and adulthood and that of gender. Just as ‘femininity’ is defined in relation to ‘masculinity’, so too ‘childhood’ has been constructed as an inferior opposite to ‘adulthood’. Just as patriarchal beliefs draw on biological essentialism to legitimise women’s social oppression, so the allegedly universal developmental vulnerabilities and incapacities of children are used to prop up a social construction which is itself a major source of their weakness, and an obstacle to their liberation. Just as androcentrism in research practice once dictated that women were ‘unknown’ and ‘unknowable’, so too adultism has obscured the social reality of children’s lives.

A multi-dimensional qualitative study was designed to explore the views of children, parents, teachers and allied professionals in evaluating the interventions of a local education authority emotional literacy project. The emphasis throughout was on the need for child and young person sensitive methodologies for eliciting and representing experience, and ethically sound approaches to researching children's and young people’s lives (Alderson and Morrow, 2004). To this end, a group of children were recruited as peer researchers and trained to conduct focus group interviews with their peers.

This paper reflects on the research PROCESS itself. The research findings in relation to the evaluation of the emotional literacy project have already been published elsewhere (Coppock, 2006). The evidence derived from the research process lends support to the argument that children can and should be taken seriously as active researchers of their own lives and that this evidence can and should contribute to the knowledge base of professionals and policy-makers.