Ethics in Norm-Critical Design for Children

Abstract

Starting from the assumption that research design is itself productive, in that it helps to create social realities and thereby the research results that it aims to investigate, the paper discusses a number of dilemmas of ethics and design in the research process. The discussion is illustrated by examples from a research project on child-parent conversations about families and relationships, which involved the development of a tablet app for data collection and that took a norm-critical approach to design. The discussion focuses specifically on dilemmas of rights and risks. The paper argues for reflexive research processes and active decision making in research design, as ways of tackling dilemmas of ethics and design that may not always be foreseeable or easily solvable.