Paper short abstract:

While using participatory methods in the Capability research is common, how to scrutinise children’s authentic views of capabilities is not yet clear. To address this issue, by using the models of rapport-building by Pitts and Miller-Day and the variants of reflexivity by Finlay and ‘epistemic justice’, in my PhD project I developed and used a conceptual and analytical tool—'reflexive rapport’.

Paper long abstract:

Sen’s (2009; 1999) work on the Capability Approach (the CA, hereafter) acknowledges individuals’ participation through their voices (Alkire, 2002) and their bottom-up participation as agents of their multidimensional developmental change (Comin, 2008). However, there is overarching debates about whether these apply to children and if so, how they can make independent and responsible choices for their capability dimensions (Saito, 2003). Many of these debates resulted from the refusal to listen to the real voices of children themselves (Lansdown, 2001). Alternatively, there is a gap and/or lack of emphasis in maintaining ‘epistemic justice’ by positioning and empowering children as ‘speakers of knowledge’ and as epistemic agents (Fricker, 2003; 2007) who are able to explain the influence of their surroundings on their wellbeing, including those influences that are unconventional/unexpected and would perhaps not fit the dominant constructions of children’s lives. Although a good number of capabilitarians (Biggeri & Melhotra, 2011; Biggeri et al., 2011; Anich et al., 2011) propose using participatory methods such as drawings, games, photovoice in the process of operationalisation of the normative framework of the CA, how to enable and exercise a process toward/of true scrutiny in understanding children’s authentic views of capabilities is not yet clear and comprehensive. To address this methodological issue, I developed a conceptual and analytical research method called ‘reflexive rapport’ which I developed and used in my PhD project.

Rapport-building and reflexivity play critical roles in achieving ethical decision-making in ethnographic research and fieldwork. While ‘reflexivity gives qualitative research a pulse’ and is ‘dynamic and creative’ (Kleinsasser, p. 155), respectful and trustworthy relationships with participants are critical (Dowling, 2008; Pitts & Miller-Day, 2007) in maintaining and sustaining that ‘pulse’. “The reflexivity demanded of qualitative researchers means that relationships with participants have been recognized as influential to the research process and the resulting interpretations” (McGinn, 2008, p. 771). Although rapport-building has always been a key topic in ethnographic scholarship, since the advent of postmodernism in the 1970s, there has been a growing emphasis on methodological self-consciousness or reflexivity, viewing social (co-)construction of knowledge and research practices as paramount (Bryman 2016; Finlay, 2002; Salzman, 2002). While a plethora of publications is dedicated to explaining them separately, very little is known about how ethnographers maintain reciprocity between rapport-building and reflexivity in understanding children’s perspectives on their lives and wellbeing. To this end, by utilizing the five phases model of rapport-building (Pitts and Miller-Day 2007) and the variants of reflexivity (Finlay 2002), I proposed the tool ‘reflexive rapport’. The notion of ‘reflexive rapport’ maintains that all variants of reflexivity may not apply to each of the five rapport-building stages and all stages of rapport-building do not apply to fieldwork either.

In my PhD project, by employing the CA, I examined how children living in a Bangladeshi urban slum perceive the influence of the catch-up primary education offered on their learning and wellbeing. Drawing on my PhD fieldwork employing participatory ethnography with children, I argued that ‘reflexive rapport’ could be an effective guiding tool in building respectful and trustworthy relationships with participants—relationships in which rapport-building and reflexivity represented mutual and complementary processes. This tool helped unravel and consciously pursue researcher–participant relationships as an entanglement with contextual and circumstantial nuances associated with class, power structures, gender, and locale. In this context, I explained how, through multiple, shifting positions, and negotiated interactions with the children, I became an ‘insider’—children’s ‘amader apa’ (our sister) which was a key enabling factor to exercise and nurture a process of true scrutiny in understanding children’s real views of capabilities impacted by their school. This conceptual and analytical research tool contributes to a growing body of literature on the conduct of ethical fieldwork and epistemic justice to understand children’s authentic perspectives about their lives and wellbeing, particularly with children from the margins of society.