The Playful Researchers: Adopting a playful approach to research design and ethics

The purpose of this symposium is to shine the spotlight on ways to align research design and ethics with developmentally appropriate practice. For children aged 0 – 8 years, it is widely accepted and recognised that developmentally appropriate practice means ‘play’. Play is a valuable pedagogical approach, which promotes children’s social, emotional and physical development. Play also affords children the opportunity to express themselves and communicate through Reggio’s ‘Hundred Languages’. Despite this, traditional and commonplace data collection methods with young children tend to be adult-led (e.g., interviews, focus groups), and provide little opportunity for children to have a voice in how and when they would like to share their views.

In response to this tension between data collection methods and knowledge about how young children like to communicate, ‘The Playful Researchers’ group at the University of Dundee was formed to design and promote research studies which are developmentally appropriate. The Playful Researchers will share three interrelated papers, each representing a different stage of the research process - ethics, methodology and findings - and each underpinned by a ‘playful approach’. Throughout each paper, we will also share how we have engaged reflexively with the playful research methodology, and will examine the influence our previous experience as early childhood educators may have had on our role as researchers.

The first presentation shares the Playful Research Ethics Framework, which highlights a playful appropriate approach to ethical considerations when conducting research with young children. The second presentation highlights children’s preferences regarding different playful data collection methods. Finally, the third presentation shares findings from a study which incorporated playful multi-methods to capture children’s views of their play spaces.