How (and why) to plan participation? Selected ethical dilemmas pertaining to legal-ethnographic participatory action research with ‘unaccompanied minors

The aim of this article is to present three selected ethical problems that I encountered when planning participatory action research with unaccompanied minors. ‘Unaccompanied minors’ are defined as those refugee children and adolescents who arrive in Poland on their own, without parents or other legal guardians. The ethical problems I encountered include: (1) the tension between ‘full participation’ and the possibility of withdrawal by research participants; (2) obtaining informed consent; (3) the risk of reproducing negative stereotypes through the use of research findings by external actors to promote resentment of minorities. The common denominator of all problems turned out to be the clash between the ideal model of participatory action research and the social reality of young people on the move – and the possibility that the former may fail in its interaction with the latter

Action (physics · Action plan · Citizen journalism · Engineering ethics · Ethnography · Legal action · Management · Participatory action research · Political science · Sociology · Anthropology · Children's Rights and Participation · Engineering · Law · Psychology · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics