Engaging children in educational research over the last two decades and as part of increasing awareness about child participation rights, has now become an orthodoxy (Punch 2016, 2002, Hammersley 2014, Spyrou 2016, Powel and Smith 2016, Alderson 2002, Graham and Powell 2014). Consequently, research on children’s participation has focused on approaches to research with children that will allow the inclusion and empowerment of young children (e.g Clarck and Moss 2001, Dahlberg and Moss 2005, Edminston 2008, O’Kane, Christensen and James 2008, Harcourt et al 2008, Segreant and Harcourt 2012, Bird et al 2014). However, it is argued that participatory research ideology so far tends to focus on how adults understand, evaluate and use such approaches to elicit our understanding of participation within the social structures of its context and children’s own contexts.

In a meta-analysis of research published between 2010-2015 it was found that research on participation tends to focus on participation as synonymous with empowerment, namely, the adult helping (or not) the child to be participant.  Here the adult role is to “allow” the child to see the “mechanics” of the social word the child wishes (or not) to enter; the role of the adult is to create “space” for children that the child must come to accept (or not) (Palaiologou, in press).  There is a tendency to focus on task-based methods with children, however, such as drawings, photographs and videos to make comprehensible meaning of children’s lives instead of a “methodological attitude taken” (Gallagher and Gallagher 2015:513).

Yet, “participatory methods are no less problematic, or ethically ambiguous, than any other methods” (Gallagher and Gallagher 2015:513). The practice of participation requires learning the techniques of enacting involvement, agency, awareness, respect, and linguistic (but not only) articulation of them.  Human beings learning to move from a state of “being alone” to a state where they identify with other human beings they see around them in the social world and take shared responsibility.  On this basis, while “participation” may seem laudable, it cannot and does not deliver all that it promises.  Perhaps this is simply because, in the face of the persistent unpredictability of the social world, it tries to offer some kind of guarantee” (Gallagher and Gallagher 2015:513). Hammersley (2015: 579) also warns us that “in practice, in participatory research with children adult researchers almost always remain in control to a considerable extent: they simply operate under the pretence that the children are in charge”. Although he recognises the value of participatory inquiry with young children, he agrees with Alderson’s (2012) view that not anyone can carry on the rigours scientific research and argues that “it is unacceptable and indeed unethical, to pretend that this work [meaning participatory investigations with young children) would normally be equivalent to inquires carried out by professional researchers”.

Despite these arguments, still a majority of advocates for participatory research are concerned with the questions of how researchers can open conversations with children to take responsibility and ownership of how the encouragement of autonomy and shared responsibility may be achieved in research. This has resulted to most of the participatory research to refer to children above the ages of 4 years old, meaning there has been limited research with younger children.  Scepticism or even denial of certain methods and a focus on creation of “spaces” that are adult oriented, rather than the provision of a conversational context in which the relationship is permeable in terms of “adult power "over the children and research, is rights-respecting ethically oriented (Palaiologou 2014, 2016, Hamersley 2015, Alderson 2012).

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