I have just returned from Edmonton, Canada where I was out teaching for a week with Jack Phelan’s Child and Youth Care Program, nursing students and sociology students. It was a most unusual St. Patrick’s day for me – indeed my first time outside Ireland for this festive day since my youthful rugby tours to France in the 1980’s. This year I celebrated by attending an ice hockey game between two Edmonton youth teams – double A’s I believe they are known as.

What was also unusual was the fact that a couple of feet of snow fell on St. Patrick’s night so my first weekday in Edmonton was quite the experience. Poor Jack was up at 6.00am digging out his driveway whilst I chatted with his good wife and took photos. Classes at Grant MacEwan College commence at 8.00am which I could never see happening back in Ireland. The students would simply refuse to attend! I managed to get thru the week’s teaching and visit child and youth care centres to meet with staff and youth in their care.

One of the presentations I gave to the students concerned ethical behaviour and responsibilities in child and youth care research, and I was very interested in the response of the students. I discussed with them my experiences when interviewing a youth aged seventeen for a book I co-wrote with a colleague of mine called Prostitution in Waterford City: A Contemporary Analysis (McElwee & Lalor, 1997).

Basically, I posed the question: When does ethical responsibility begin and end? The example goes thus. In 1997 I interviewed a seventeen year-old who reported selling sexual favours. This interview took place with a female researcher also present. During the course of the interview the youth, let’s call her Karen, disclosed her family background and asked that we faithfully record her account of events growing up. We did so and the interview was signed off. Some two years later, Karen was in a bookstore with a friend and her (new) foster parents when the friend picked up the book and started leafing thru it. She came upon the interview with Karen and recognised details in it from stories Karen had told her over the years. Unfortunately, the foster parents were unaware of these details and all four became very upset. The following week I received a call from Human Services who had been contacted.

There were several approaches open to me. The first was to simply ignore the call and carry on with my daily business. After all, it was two years later and I had moved on to several other studies. The second was to engage with Human Services and attempt to explain our research in much greater detail. Fortunately, we had kept the interview data for a period of five years and would have been able to reproduce this should we have had to. The third was to adopt an entirely legalistic approach and refuse to speak to anyone unless Counsel was present. Which option would you have chosen?

I share this experience with readers because I had a number of conversations with the Canadian students and it has made me reflect once again on research in this area. My own view is that we should treat the people with whom we do research as partners in the process as opposed to subjects. We, therefore, owe it to them to try our very best to explain clearly and honestly not just the immediacy of the study, but also potential future ramifications for study participants. This will obviously limit the questions we want to ask and the answers we want to obtain. So it is when working with children and youth. I’d like to thank the Sociology and Child and Youth Care students for their attention and thought-provoking comments.

Be Well,

Niall