Abstract
Understanding the perspectives of refugee children on their lives is important for acknowledging children’s rights, competence, and contributions to practice and policy. Children’s perspectives are the views they construct for framing events, relationships and images, and the meanings they convey in relational coactions with other people and institutions. We demonstrate the usefulness of digital technology in the form of computer-assisted interviews (CAIs) for enabling refugee children to express perspectives on their lives in resettlement. We describe how CAIs constructed by adopting a child’s perspective recognize the children’s agency and enable their expressions of their perspectives. We illustrate the facilities of CAIs with analyses of children’s ratings and open-ended typed comments about their worries and who helps them to feel better. Children’s views revealed the predominance of family members as sources of worry and help. We discuss the implications of using digital technology in research to provide children with ways of contributing to knowledge construction.
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