Participatory Health Promotion Research with Children

It is well established that health promotion has been dominated by biomedical perspectives that privilege individualized explanations for, and actions about, common health problems. Although more structural and participatory explanations and actions have emerged, they still remain contested. An added complication with children is that the empowerment agenda does not sit easily with adult-led research on children, asserting that children lack the capacity to participate with researchers to give their accounts of their lives. In this chapter, we explain why adultist health promotion research is likely to fail. We introduce a theoretical and ethical framework building on the approaches of children’s rights and conceptualizing children as citizens who are capable of providing critical perspectives on their lives and futures. By analyzing four studies, we provide details of the use of qualitative and ethnographic methods to develop new knowledge and explain the links between structure and agency, which characterize critical theory approaches to health promotion research. Guidance is provided to enable health promotion research to foreground rights and equity as we grapple with COVID-19. We conclude by proposing steps to increase the effectiveness of child health promotion research.