Guiding the focus of research on children and young people’s participation in the context of COVID-19

The secondary impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on children and young people have been significant, including impacts on education, young people’s social lives, physical activity and mental health, as well as increased abuse. These impacts risk running into the long term, and in order to mitigate this, a better understanding of how children and young people’s lives have changed and the role they can play in driving solutions is needed. UNICEF’s global Communication for Development (C4D) team has commenced a collaborative project with partners, the Children & Young People Participatory Research and Communication for Change Initiative, to better understand the experiences and perspectives of children and young people in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, as well as to what extent they are able to be involved in developing solutions. As part of this initiative, desk reviews were carried out to establish the landscape of children and young people’s experience of issues in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as their participation in these issues. This paper serves to narrow down the focus of the subsequent research to be undertaken by UNICEF and partners as part of the initiative, which will produce new information on children and young people’s experiences and participation in the context of COVID-19, and help build a model for children and young people’s participation to inform future UNICEF Communication for Development programmes. Through interviews and focus groups with UNICEF staff in the 11 participating country offices, this paper produces a set of recommendations for specific areas of research in terms of the key issues to be further investigated regarding children and young people’s participation in the context of COVID-19. It also demonstrates how using strengths-based and intersectional approaches to the research can bring subaltern youth voices in particular to the fore