By Anna Bolgrien

Kids’ opinions and perspectives are often missing or overlooked because surveys are ill-designed to include them.  The Animating Children’s View methodology is an efficient, low-risk, and accessible way to survey youth ages 12-17 so that their views can affect policy.

Often young people have the opportunity to share their experiences with adult researchers; to discuss their own interpretations of their experiences; and to express how they would like to be treated. But even when researchers write about youths’ understandings and perspectives, there is often a disconnect between the scholarship, policies, and funding ostensibly created to assist youth. Why?

Deborah Levison, my doctoral advisor, has studied youths’ work for many years. She observed that child labor policies failed to take into account excellent studies of small groups of young workers, such as those by Bourdillon (1999), Bromley and Mackie (2009), Orkin (2011), and Woodhead (1999). Levison suspected that the disconnect reflected policymakers’ biases and propensity to base decisions on large-scale survey data. These datasets generally collect information from adults above age 17. All information is about children, rather than from children. Is the child in school?  Did the child get vaccinated?  How many hours per day does the child do sports or other activities?  Adults respond for children, even older teens who are better informed about their own situation. Questions about opinions, views, or perspectives are often excluded altogether. For children’s own perspectives to affect policy creation, the methods of survey data need to adopt some aspects of qualitative research while maintaining the large-scale representativeness that policy makers insist on.

Seeing the disconnect between research and policy development, Levison proposed the following question: If big surveys also included youth as respondents, and somehow captured their views and perspectives, would that catch policy makers’ attention?  In response, we created the Animating Children’s Views (ACV) project in 2017.  The goal of ACV is to develop a survey mechanism that grants youth (ages 12+) an opportunity to describe the situation of youth in their communities.  

The goal of Animating Children’s Views is to improve survey methodologies for engaging youth about their lives. The survey method must be (1) understandable to youth age 12-17, regardless of their culture or ability to read or write; (2) a low-risk opportunity for kids to share their perspectives and (3) compatible with adult-focused surveys already conducted around the world. 

ACV uses short, animated cartoon videos to tell a story or pose a dilemma. After watching the video, youth respondents are asked a series of questions about the characters in the video.  What should the cartoon boy do?  What is the best outcome for the cartoon girl?  What will happen next to the cartoon girl? These types of questions allow the respondent to think about the situation and react to the difficulty faced by the cartoon character. The cartoons show situations that are well-known dilemmas in the respondent’s community.  This makes the stories familiar and something that respondents may have observed or experienced. Thus, by answering survey questions about the cartoon character, researchers can learn what youth think about particular situations.

The cartoon + question approach can be adapted to collect information on a wide variety of topics. So far, we have explored stories on:

• Migration

• Education

• Health

• Friend and family relationships

• Domestic violence

• Sexual and reproductive health

• Work and labor

The main requirement is the topic must be relevant to kids and policy makers. Success with kids depends on creatively making the ACV method accessible and low risk. Success with policymakers depends on the results being compatible with data from other sources and efficiently implemented using tablet computers in the field.  

Accessibility 

The cartoons (videos and images) are created in collaboration with a California-based artist, Hillary Carter Liggett. Because we want to use the same characters and stories across many different cultures, characters have few distinguishing features such as race, ethnicity, religion, or class. This helps the respondent view the cartoon character as possibly being a part of their own community, and not attributing other stereotypes onto the image. We are establishing a library of images that can be adapted into new stories and topics.

Stories must be simple but focused in order to make survey responses understandable to adult researchers. The cartoons must be engaging enough to hold respondents’ attention and allow the respondents to thoughtfully answer questions about the story. Videos can be quickly and affordably created or adapted for use across languages, cultures, countries, and subjects. Using voice-overs makes the videos more accessible to kids with limited literacy skills.

Low-risk

It can be uncomfortable and risky for some young people to participate in surveys that ask for sensitive information, especially when they cannot talk in a private place. Using videos shown on tablet computers lowers the risk to youth respondents.   Respondents wear headphones to watch the video while listening to a voiceover recording in their language. Stories and questions are asked in a way where respondents are answering questions about the cartoon kid’s experience, not about their own experience.  This is important because it may not be safe for a respondent to answer directly about her or his own life on particularly sensitive topics.  But a respondent can still communicate her or his perspectives and opinions about the topic by talking about how the cartoon kid should and would respond to a situation. 

Compatibility

Many large survey organizations are using tablet computers to conduct surveys. This major technology shift in data collection means that there is ample room for innovative and creative ways to engage with respondents.

The ACV methodology can be used with surveys used by large survey organizations working to collect data in many countries such as the Demographic and Health surveys, the UNECIF MICS, and Performance Measurement for Action.  Organizations that are interviewing households can create stories and have a small module that includes children as respondents.  This small addition fills a major gap in data collection. New survey methodologies like ACV can provide policymakers with a source of large-scale representative data about children’s views and perspectives that has long been missing.

Levison and I, along with local collaborators and field teams, have piloted the methodology with 12-17-year olds in Tanzania, Nepal, and currently in Brazil, and we are looking for new partners interested in implementing the ACV methodology.  The ACV method of asking questions can be a resource for organizations, large and small, to include children’s perspectives in a survey. 

About the author

Anna Bolgrien is a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota - Humphrey School of Public Affairs.  She and her advisor, Professor Deborah Levison, are currently working on multiple publications on different aspects of the Animating Children’s Views methodology.