Metodologiska och etiska utmaningar med att utforska barns perspektiv på deltagande i en hybrid verklighet

This article contributes with knowledge on the methodological and ethical challenges entailed in research on children’s roles in a rapidly changing digitized world. The theoretical framework comprises children’s perspectives, children’s agency and Dewey’s notion of experience. Three sub-studies investigated how different methods affected the relationship between researcher and informantand whether these methods gave the children power and influence over their participation in the research process. The methods tested were a) individual interviews based on an interview guide,b) individual interviews during which children’s multimodal representations (saved on their mobile phones/iPads) served as starting points, c) group interviews and d) video-recorded play sessions with groups in Minecraft followed by individual video-stimulated recall. What emerges is a challengein the form of a paradox: the more influence the children are allowed to influence the process, and the more nuanced and multidimensional that the data obtained is, the more often questions arise regarding ethics, integrity, and research ethics. By discussing ethical guidelines for research in relation to the Convention on the Rights of the child, this article contributes with knowledge valuable for the research field investigating children’s perspectives on participation in a hybrid reality.Keywords: Children, digitalization, ethics, hybrid reality, methods