Researching children’s Covid-19 friendship experiences online: methodological and ethical opportunities and challenges

In March 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic was rife and global lockdowns were implemented research restrictions were also put in place curtailing established research practice with children. These restrictions required researchers to reflexively navigate the interplay between responsiveness and responsibility to ensure that ethical processes continued to be fluid and co-produced. Teasing out the ethical dilemmas, this article examines the enforced online research experience with children during this time to show its complexities and idiosyncratic nature. It draws upon data examples from a pilot case study project with ten 7-11-year-olds investigating how children maintained their friendships during lockdown in the UK. Data were collected through a range of creative participatory research methods accompanied by an open-ended online unstructured interview. This paper has implications for researchers and educators for future online data collection with children as it reflects on the ethical maze of doing research with children online. Reflections provide new insights into how allowing children to choose their creative method facilitated the production of agentic knowledge.