Researching Children’s Experiences in a Global Pandemic

Researching children’s voices and experiences can be a difficult task to navigate, even in the absence of a global pandemic. This can be even more challenging when studying children with special educational needs and disabilities, including language and communication needs. With researchers having limited access to schools, and face-to-face data collection methods being unviable during the pandemic, novel and remote ways of collecting data have become necessary. In this paper I will reflect on the challenges I faced when designing data collection methods for my PhD study exploring how children with special educational needs and disabilities experience friendships, and how those experiences differ between mainstream and special education schools. The challenges faced as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, including redesigning the study to accommodate lack of school availability, will be discussed, along with the way in which technology can be used to assist in data collection during a pandemic. I discuss the benefits and possible challenges of one of my major changes, a switch to using parents as interviewers. The paper will aim to provide an insight into alternative data collection methods and how this global crisis may have benefited data collection from hard-to-reach samples.