Children and COVID-19 Research Library

This paper documents co-participatory research with children in six primary schools in Ireland during the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores the use of what we term digital dialogues with diverse groups of children aged 9–10 years as members of Child Research Advisory Groups. The paper conceptualises the digital dialogues as sites of resistance as well as constraint, empowering children to articulate their voices in relation to schooling and the pandemic, whilst mediated by power dynamics—between adults and children, and between children, in the articulation of those voices.

Qualitative researchers are increasingly using online data collection methods, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study compared the data quality (i.e., interview duration, average number of themes and sub-themes, and inaudible words) of 34 interviews (29 conducted by Zoom (16 with camera on, 13 camera off) and 5 conducted by phone) drawn from a study focusing on youth’s coping experiences during the pandemic.

Collecting data to understand violence against women and children during and after the COVID-19 pandemic is essential to inform violence prevention and response efforts. Although researchers across fields have pivoted to remote rather than in-person data collection, remote research on violence against women, children and young people poses particular challenges. As a group of violence researchers, we reflect on our experiences across eight studies in six countries that we redesigned to include remote data collection methods.

This project forwards insights about the importance of being in ‘the room where it happens’ – creating tactility and togetherness in the research encounter – for research with children and young people in times of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Created in response to the intense uptake of digital methods catalysed by COVID-19, this project productively re-imagines moments from our creative visual research with children and young people from before the COVID-19 pandemic. This re-imagining began early in 2020 and has continued to evolve, incorporating our shifting perspectives and ‘thinking with’ the scholarship of leading creative methodologists.

Rapid Advice Guidelines (RAG) provide decision makers with guidance to respond to public health emergencies by developing evidence-based recommendations in a short period of time with a scientific and standardized approach. However, the experience from the development process of a RAG has so far not been systematically summarized. Therefore, this working group will take the experience of the development of the RAG for children with COVID-19 as an example to systematically explore the methodology, advantages, and challenges in the development of the RAG. It shall propose suggestions and reflections for future research, in order to provide a more detailed reference for future development of RAGs.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created unique challenges for recruitment of adults and children into clinical research. The sudden onset of stay-at-home orders and social distancing enacted in much of the United States created sudden barriers for researchers to recruit participants in-person. Recognizing the critical need to understand the impact of COVID-19 on children and families in real time, studies required an alternative approach. The present study sought to develop methods and establish the feasibility of utilizing Facebook's targeted advertising to enroll schoolaged children and their parents for a study examining the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on families. This study used an 8 week pay-per-click advertisement approach via Facebook for research recruitment. Parents of children age 8 to 17 were invited and asked to include their child. Standardized measures were included for parents and children. Zip code targeting was used to increase diversity in participants.

The COVID-19 pandemic occurred during planned neurodevelopmental follow-up of Colombian children with antenatal Zika-virus exposure. The objective of the study was to leverage the institution's telemedicine infrastructure to support international clinical child outcome research. In a prospective cohort study of child neurodevelopment (NCT04398901), we used synchronous telemedicine to remotely train a research team and perform live observational assessments of children in Sabanalarga, Colombia. An observational motor and conceptional standardized tool kit was mailed to Colombia; other materials were translated and emailed; team training was done virtually. Children were recruited by team on the ground. Synchronous activities were video-recorded directly to two laptops, each with a telehealth Zoom link to allow simultaneous evaluation of "table" and "standing" activities, and backup recordings were captured directly on the device in Colombia.

The UNICEF Evaluation Office, in collaboration with Communication for Development (C4D) section in the UNICEF Programme Group and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, developed the Community Rapid Assessment (CRA) exercise as a way to measure the protective practices, health-seeking behaviours, coping strategies and emerging needs of individuals and households in relation to COVID-19. The primary objective was to provide UNICEF country offices valuable data to strengthen the evidence base and inform country-level programming in response to the pandemic. The CRA is also intended to contribute to UNICEF’s overall analytical agenda on COVID in an effort to better position this type work in the overall corporate efforts. Its findings have thus far provided a rich and much-needed picture of the behavioural component of the outbreak at the individual and community levels. In making use of time-series data – that is, the longitudinal data repeatedly captured over several waves of data collection – the CRA has also provided further opportunities to examine country- and region-specific trends over time. And because the CRA is a real-time exercise, analysis, visualization and interpretation of findings are already being used in several country-level fora to guide program changes. The long-term vision is to embed capacity for similar surveys within government data systems at the country level. This report presents early findings and insights from eight countries in Eastern and Southern Africa – namely Angola, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Rwanda, South Africa, South Sudan and Uganda.

Research involving migrant youth involves navigating and negotiating complex challenges in order to uphold their rights and dignity, but also all while maintaining scientific rigour. COVID-19 has changed the global landscape within many domains and has increasingly highlighted inequities that exist. With restrictions focusing on maintaining physical distancing set in place to curb the spread of the virus, conducting in-person research becomes complicated. This article reflects on the ethical and methodological challenges encountered when conducting qualitative research during the pandemic with Syrian migrant youth who are resettled in Canada. The three areas discussed from the study are recruitment, informed consent and managing the interviews. Special attention to culture as being part of the study’s methodology as an active reflexive process is also highlighted. The goal of this article is to contribute to the growing understanding of complexities of conducting research during COVID-19 with populations which have layered vulnerabilities, such as migrant youth. This article hopes that the reflections may help future researchers in conducting their research during this pandemic by being cognizant of both the ethical and methodological challenges discussed.

This article compares two studies, one pre- and one post-COVID-19, to consider the ethics of researching with children, especially during uncertain times. It argues that ethics are entwined with assumptions about children, ‘voice’, relational dynamics and representation. To reflect upon those assumptions and their ethical implications, the study draws upon three Bakhtinian dialogical principles: that the self is in its nature responsive and never fully knowable or complete; that meaning-making is a complex, dynamic, situated activity; and that finalisation is deeply unethical. It proposes a dialogic approach to researching with children as an ethical orientation which respects our common humanity and agency and allows for trust, sensitivity, responsive meaning-making, openness and inarticulacy. It also considers the perplexities of achieving dialogic relationships and meaningful dialogue with children, especially at times when researcher and participants may be separated physically in space and time and when methodological compromises may be unavoidable.

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need for new ways of thinking about data protection. This is especially so in the case of health research with children. The responsible use of children’s data plays a key role in promoting children’s well-being and securing their right to health and to privacy. In this article, we contend that a contextual approach that appropriately balances children’s legal and moral rights and interests is needed when thinking about data protection issues with children.

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak rapidly became a worldwide pandemic in early 2020. In Australia, government-mandated restrictions on non-essential face-to-face contact in the healthcare setting have been crucial for limiting opportunities for COVID-19 transmission, but they have severely limited, and even halted, many research activities. This institute’s research practices in the vulnerable populations of pregnant women and young infants needed to adapt in order to continue without exposing participants, or staff, to an increased risk of exposure to COVID-19. Here, are discuss pre-and-post COVID-19 methods for conducting research regarding nutrition during pregnancy, infancy, and early childhood.

This study examined the experiences, learnings, and strategies of Health Educators (HE) as they transitioned from a home-based model for motivational interviewing (MI) to remote delivery during COVID-19. The overall goal of this paper is to identify key lessons learned to help inform future delivery of remote MI delivery.

Formulating evidence-based recommendations for children affected by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is challenging. Identifying and synthesizing the evidence to inform these recommendations has become difficult. With the explosion of publications on preprint servers and in journals, waste in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) research is common. While replication of systematic reviews may be appropriate in some instances, duplication refers to needless repetition of the same review.1 Answering simple questions, such as the most common findings in children with COVID-19, requires an enormous effort. We aimed to map 1 of these questions (ie, what is the spectrum and frequency of imaging findings in children with COVID-19?) to illustrate the overlap and shortcomings of the evidence syntheses in this area.

Children and young people’s participation in decision-making has substantially increased in the last 3 decades; although, their participation in research has been more problematic due to traditional views that exclude them from the realm of knowledge generation. This article critically reflects on the way that 12 children and young people engaged as co-researchers in an intergenerational research project that explored the perspectives of children and young people during the COVID-19 outbreak. Drawing upon the experiences of these child researchers, the author discusses the methodological and ethical complexities of their engagement—which is already a disputed topic—in the context of the global health crisis characterized by lockdowns, isolation, and social distancing.