Priscilla Alderson

University College London | UCL · Social Science Research Unit

Charities do three main kinds of work. They are primarily fund-raisers, service-providers, or boat-rockers, though they all have to raise some funds. Specialist fund-raising charities pass on their proceeds to other agencies, such as laboratories where new medicines are developed. Service-providing charities opened the first children’s hospitals in...

The government's politics increasingly drive the detailed organisation and rapid privatisation of healthcare. Government austerity policies and mismanagement of healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic have had a great impact on the nation's health. There are less than half the number of NHS beds today than there were 30 years ago, and many staff ar...

The government's politics increasingly drive the detailed organisation and rapid privatisation of healthcare. Government austerity policies and mismanagement of healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic have had a great impact on the nation's health. There are less than half the number of NHS beds today than there were 30 years ago, and many staff ar...

A Practical introduction to critical realism summarises some basic critical realist theories. It is shown on 'UCL 2-11-2023(2).pptx' - copy and paste that into your search box

The Critical Social Ontology of Inalienable Human Rights analyses how critical realism uncovers deeper realities in human rights. The Lecture is shown on https://clipchamp.com/watch/tR8i78R9H2X

Critical realism is compared with realist evaluation and discussed with an online audience including Ray Pawson free open access on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX7aVFmAemQ

The theory of epistemic injustice illuminates how children's and mothers' knowledge of their best interests in hospitals is rational, embodied and emotional and is discredited on those grounds.

Invited plenary lecture on prize-winning book Critical Realism for Health and Illness Research

The online e-book records the celebration of Berry Mayall's life and work on 4th April 2023 at University College London link: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10172775/

The book reports doctoral research on parents' consent to heart surgery, reissued by Routledge Revivals 2023

Children's autonomy includes, as far as possible, self-determination, bodily integrity and the right to influence outcomes. Limits to bodily integrity, which involves no touching without the child's consent or tacit agreement, are discussed. The clinical, legal and ethics literature tends to agree that children may give valid consent to major recom...

Obstacles to publishing innovative research about children's competence in leading conservative journals

How social activities in schools help young people with mental distress

Paediatric cardiology practitioners and related experts report unusually young ages when they begin to inform children about their non-urgent heart surgery and begin to respect children’s consent or refusal. Research methods included observations in two paediatric cardiothoracic units, audio-recorded interviews with 45 experts, and qualitative data...

We discussed our papers on Fear and on Love published in Quaker Quarterly

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Theories in Childhood Studies showcases the cutting-edge theoretical work that has been produced within the field of childhood studies. It speaks to both scholars and students in the field by addressing basic questions such as what childhood is, how childhoods are diversely constructed and how children’s experiences can b...

There is free online access. Mainstream law and ethics literature on consent to children’s surgery contrasts with moral experiences of children and adults observed in two heart surgery centres. Research interviews were conducted with 45 practitioners and related experts, and with 16 families of children aged 6 to 15, admitted for non-urgent surgery...

A brief introduction and discussion about the value of critical realism in childhood studies research and analysis https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/humanities-and-social-sciences/research/research-themes/children-childhood/children-in-theory/critical-realism/

Exchanges between the great range of disciplines and experts within IOE (Institute of Education), UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society (University College London, UK), can be very productive. This article celebrates two professors who, in markedly different ways, have transformed interdisciplinary understanding of their chosen specialties. Some o...

Background Standards generally reported in the literature about informing children and respecting their consent or refusal before elective heart surgery may differ from actual practice. This research aims to summarize the main themes in the literature about paediatric anaesthesia and compare these with research findings on how health professionals...

In this wide-ranging interview Priscilla Alderson discusses how she came to research parental and childhood consent and became a sociologist and how, late in her career, she became convenor of the critical realism group started by Roy Bhaskar at the Institute for Education in London. She discusses aspects of her seminal research over the years on m...

The blog explains the new online course on critical realism

Background This analysis is about practical living bioethics and how law, ethics and sociology understand and respect children’s consent to, or refusal of, elective heart surgery. Analysis of underlying theories and influences will contrast legalistic bioethics with living bioethics. In-depth philosophical analysis compares social science tradition...

Basic concepts in critical realism and how they can be applied in graduate and post graduate and general research, run from University College London

Tenth session in the 2022 Zoom reading group. Douglas Porpora summarises problems in traditional sociology and seven commitments for critical realist research https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k418r6p5iM&t=206s

Children's rights explained in English and Portuguese see https://ebooks.uminho.pt/index.php/uminho/catalog/view/36/113/1152-1 edited by Catarina Tomás, Gabriela Trevisan, Maria João Leote de Carvalho e Natália Fernandes

Ten sessions on critical realism view session 1 https://youtu.be/yrZhaku0tHI ; session 2 https://youtu.be/wIDYlrnQHXk; session 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uEEkffOrVw session 4 https://youtu.be/8eAoST-rcyY session 5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOIoWjsyWrU session 6 . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaeVZbbIQho

Background: The law and literature about children's consent generally assume that patients aged under-18 cannot consent until around 12 years, and cannot refuse recommended surgery. Children deemed pre-competent do not have automatic rights to information or to protection from unwanted interventions. However, the observed practitioners tend to inf...

Critical realism helps researchers to extend and clarify their analyses. This original text draws on international examples of health and illness research across the life course, from small studies to large trials, to show how versatile critical realism can be in validating research and connecting it to policy and practice.

During a cholera epidemic in the Soho area of London in 1854, Dr John Snow hoped to find the cause of the illness. He mapped the households where the people with cholera lived and tracked their daily life and movements in the area. These centred on a water pump used by poorer families. The pump was next to a workhouse and a brewery that had their o...

A brief introduction to critical realism view on https://www.aku.edu/iedpk/Pages/doctoral-lecture-series.aspx

Neoliberalism, health and illness are all vast topics that range from global to local, personal to political. Critical realism offers valuable concepts, which help to extend and deepen analysis of these large, complex research areas. These include attending to unseen causal influences, absence, values, power, interests, structure and agency and mor...

The law and literature on children’s consent greatly differ from observed practices in two London hospitals. The law and literature generally assume that legal minors cannot consent until their mid-teens, they cannot refuse recommended surgery, and children deemed pre-competent have no rights to information. However, our research found that with no...

This discussion paper considers how seldom recognised theories influence clinical ethics committees. A companion paper examined four major theories in social science: positivism, interpretivism, critical theory and functionalism, which can encourage legalistic ethics theories or practical living bioethics, which aims for theory–practice congruence....

This social science project is seeking to advance the debate on informed consent. The prospect of having any kind of medical procedure can be stressful and worrying, but often if we find out more about it and know what to expect, some of those worries can be eased. But knowing at what stage and how to inform and involve children in decisions about...

An analysis of problems of powerful knowledge and associated social injustice

Discussion of the book Critical Realism for Health and Illness Research: A Practical Introduction. by Priscilla Alderson Policy Press

This session give a few introductory ideas about critical realism from my new book Critical Realism for Health and Illness Research: A Practical Introduction.

Truth and trust are at the centre of valid consent to surgery, with honest accounts and agreements by patients and surgeons. Yet social scientists’ study of consent is complicated by their uneasy relationships with truth. Ethnographies can involve researchers’ deceptions. Positivist truth claims rest on the findings being precisely replicable, whic...

Critical realism, as a toolkit of practical ideas, helps researchers to extend and clarify their analyses. It resolves problems arising from splits between different research approaches, builds on the strengths of different methods and overcomes their individual limitations. This original text draws on international examples of health and illness r...

Chapter 2 sets out basic critical realism concepts to show how they help to resolve the problems examined in Chapter 1. The concepts or themes include: the need to separate ontology-being from epistemology-thinking; the transitive and intransitive; the semiotic triangle; open and closed systems and demi-regs; the possibility of naturalism; natural...

Chapter 6 on the four stages of dialectical transformative change involves concepts of: absence as well as presence; difference versus actual transformative change; emergence of higher order things from lower order ones; immanent critique. With the four stages, the acronym MELD stands for first Moment, second Edge, third Level and fourth Dimension....

Critical realism helps researchers to extend and clarify their analyses. This original text draws on international examples of health and illness research across the life course, from small studies to large trials, to show how versatile critical realism can be in validating research and connecting it to policy and practice.

This research is intended to increase understanding of the views and experiences of children aged 6-15 years having heart surgery, their needs, hopes and fears, in order that parents and practitioners may provide children with more research-based information and support. The aim is to contribute to ways of involving children in the decision making...

For researchers engaged with ethical research involving children, Priscilla Alderson and Virginia Morrow need no introduction. Their Handbook has shaped so much of what we know about ethical research involving children. Priscilla and Virginia have just released the fourth version of the Handbook (Sage 2nd edition) and we are privileged to have the...

Reviews the ten stages of research and ethical questions raised at each stage. Considers the 'rise and fall' of research ethics over three decades. Includes many examples of how researchers around the world tackle ethical questions.

Consent can only be voluntary, freely given and uncoerced. Can this legal adult standard also apply to children? High-risk surgery is seldom a wanted choice, but compared with the dangers of the untreated problem, surgery can become the least unwanted option. Critical realism helps to reveal explicit and hidden levels of informed and voluntary cons...

Consent can only be voluntary, freely given and uncoerced. Can this legal adult standard also apply to children? High-risk surgery is seldom a wanted choice, but compared with the dangers of the untreated problem, surgery can become the least unwanted option. Critical realism helps to reveal explicit and hidden levels of informed and voluntary cons...

Can knowledge be powerful and, if so, what forms do knowledge and power take? The view of some social realist curriculum theorists that power exists in academic theories although not in everyday understanding is questioned. Power is taken to exist through social positions, and to involve control over resources, decisions and change. Critical realis...

All the Articles in the UN 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child can apply to babies from birth as shown in this chapter. It begins by examining legal and natural rights. Natural rights that are inalienable to all human beings especially apply to babies. Protection, provision and participation rights are reviewed in turn for their relevance to...

We seek to clarify and assess the underlying moral reasons for opposing all medically unnecessary genital cutting of female minors, no matter how severe. We find that within a Western medicolegal framework, these reasons are compelling. However, they do not only apply to female minors, but rather to non-consenting persons of any age irrespective of...

The most practical first step, when doing research or reading a research report, is to check the theory. All research is driven by theories, which can have even more influence over researchers if they are unaware of them. For example, before around 1980, sexism and racism dominated social research. Inevitably, inferior traits were found in certain...

The pulse in the title Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (Bhaskar, 2008) suggests a beating heart, and consent is at the heart of freedom. Its absence is at the heart of coercion. From personal to political, marriage to the vote, consent threads through daily interactions. Consent may be respected or not. A mouse click ‘consenting’ to cookies may joi...

Critical realism helps to resolve contradictions between positivism and interpretivism, to analyse levels of reality and of being human, and to research transformative change over time. It is important to take children seriously as active contributors to their communities.

Children have been central to the British Empire’s mission to maintain and reproduce its present and assure its future. When the average global age was much younger than it is today, there were many more children in proportion to adults. There was also greater urgency in older adults’ sense of having to hand over responsibilities to younger generat...

The concept of powerful knowledge (PK) has central dichotomies and contradictions, which this article questions. The origins, meaning, purpose and reality of PK are considered. PK is based in social realism, and the article suggests how critical realism could inform more illuminating analyses of knowledge and power. The two versions of realism are...

Children’s Rights: Today’s Global Challenge draws widely on social, economic, political and global sources and has three main substantive chapters: on education, slavery and the vote. John Wall considers the right to education that is ‘available, accessible, acceptable and adaptable’ (Tomasevski, 2004) to benefit everyone. He deplores how inflexibl...

Before the NHS was established, without state funding few families could afford paediatric services. But since 1948, the NHS has funded and gradually developed the necessary paediatric medical, surgical, nursing and technical services, the training and research. From the 1970s onwards, paediatric cardiology, the care of children born with abnormal...

Equally distributed prosperity depends on equal respect for all. Women’s legal right to own property was not recognised in Britain until 1882 when, slowly, women began to be recognised as real people and were no longer dismissed as unreliable dependents. From the 1960s onwards, the campaign for women’s rights was advanced by two useful words. First...

Today more than half the world’s refugees are children and their numbers appear to rise continually. Child refugees tend to be at the greatest risk not only of lethal danger but also of being neglected by immigration systems. Jason Pobjoy studied the cases of 82 unaccompanied children who were applying to be refugees in Uganda to escape from extrem...

Over the past 25 years, the main contributions that the International Journal of Children’s Rights (IJCR) has made to demonstrate the complexity and diversity of children’s rights are in: 1) the broad range of topics and in how rights cover all aspects of children’s lives, 2) the geographical scope and variety spanning across the world, and 3) the...

This paper considers how teachers, psychologists and policy makers can respect the rights of all school students, through methods that are principled, humane, cost-effective and democratic. It examines how special educational needs and disability (SEND) services affect all school students and teachers and their rights. The paper considers the histo...

https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article5109-humans-and-animals.html Examples of animals appearing to understand language and morality

The second edition in kindle has a new foreword reviewing how very topicalWhat is special about special schools? Enabling Education concludes that special schools are not at all special in terms of resources, staffing and outcomes. More seriously the authors suggest that special schools waste children's lives, forcing them into a cycle of dependenc...

In the seventeenth century, Isaac Penington and Isaac Newton were searching for something similar. As Pennington described it: ‘the end of words is to bring [us] to the knowledge of things beyond what words can utter’.* Drawing on Eastern and Western philosophy, the British-Indian philosopher Roy Bhaskar identified three levels of reality, and thes...

Enabling Education: experiences in special and ordinary schools is an unusual book in two main ways. It directly reports the detailed views of school students aged 4 to 16 years who have disabilities and other difficulties. And it connects them and their schools into their political contexts. Planning the provision of ordinary or inclusive mainstre...

How did Down’s syndrome come to be a major concern for prenatal screening? Among all the innate abnormalities and illnesses that can be detected prenatally, it is not painful or lethal or particularly physically disabling. And among conditions diagnosed in the early years it is not socially isolating like autism and deafness, or disruptive like ADH...

Examples of animals appearing to be able to understand words, numbers, colour, death and fairness

Article 12 with its concern to give “due weight” to children’s views involves potential contradictions between human rights to self-determination and children’s rights. A set of conditions in Article 12 turns rights into highly qualified permissions that can transfer agency and control from children onto adults. These are further complicated by rep...

We are increasingly confronted with dangerous environmental change, weakening democracies, growing social inequalities, unemployment and poverty especially among young people, and global economies based on unsustainable growth and waste in a finite planet. These problems all interact and intensify one another. Yet they tend to be addressed separate...

The lost and stolen child is seen as central to colonial and [post]colonial Australian in Young and Free. Colonialist-settlers continue in their efforts to modernise the Aboriginal people by imposing their imagined ideas of proper childhood on indigenous children, the age group most easily colonised and subdued. To the colonialists-settlers, the na...

Article 12 with its concern to give "due weight" to children's views involves potential contradictions between human rights to self-determination and children's rights. A set of conditions in Article 12 turns rights into highly qualified permissions that can transfer agency and control from children onto adults. These are further complicated by rep...

The Japanese translation of the 2011 practical handbook on the ethics of research with children.

Colleagues of the late Dr Judith Ennew have presented 14 chapters that celebrate her life and work in this liber amicorum (book from friends). For decades, Judith combined research and advocacy for and with children and young people around the world in what the book generally terms the Eurocentric Global North and also the Global South. She constan...

This chapter reviews leading trends in current research, policy and practice on children’s rights, some common omissions, and what we could gain by renewed attention to the power at the centre of the Children in Charge series. The 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), almost as old as JKP, has led to a child rights industry which,...

Criticisms and misunderstandings of children's rights are reviewed, as well as ways in which they are important and useful for professionals working with the youngest children.

In this 25th anniversary volume of the International Journal of Children's Rights, responses are reviewed to common criticisms of children's rights, within the Journal's aims to promote greater understanding of these rights and greater practical respect for them. This article then considers three main ways through which the Journal might expand its...

For centuries, experts have endorsed beliefs about original sin, recently morphed into the selfish gene. Are we innately amoral or pre-moral if not immoral? Is morality wholly learned, synthetic and acquired, or partly an innate authentic part of human nature?