“Listening to children’s voices” can help foster respectful regard for their experiences and concerns and promote the recognition of children as active agents; that is, persons who have interests and capacities to participate in discussions and decisions that affect them and other people. However, “listening to children’s voices” can have many different forms, and the ways that these voices should be linked to children’s agency can be unclear. I outline several common misconceptions that can impede “listening to children’s voices” as forms of epistemological oppression. I argue for a thick conception of children’s voices, recognizing that children’s expressions are relationally embedded expressions of their agency. Understanding children’s voices and experiences requires hermeneutical approaches that can help discern what is meaningful for a child in a particular situation. I discuss ontological, epistemological, and methodological shifts that are required for hermeneutical inquiry with children and outline specific methods that can be used, oriented by guiding questions. This hermeneutical methodology can help advance our understanding of children’s experiences as well as their aspirations and concerns in research and in professional practice.

Participant observation strategies may be particularly effective for research involving children and their families in health care settings. These techniques, commonly used in ethnography and grounded theory, can elicit data and foster insights more readily than other research approaches, such as structured interviews or quantitative methods. This article outlines recommendations for the ethical conduct of participant observation in pediatric health care settings. This involves a brief overview of the significant contributions that participant observation can bring to our understanding of children and families in health care settings; an examination of the elements of participant observation that are necessary conditions for its effective conduct; an outline of contemporary ethical norms in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States for research in pediatric health care settings; and a discussion of how participant observation research should be operationalized in order to comply with these norms.

To examine whether physicians or parents assume responsibility for treatment decisions for critically ill children and how this relates to subsequent parental experience. A significant controversy has emerged regarding the role of parents, relative to physicians, in relation to treatment decisions for critically ill children. Anglo-American settings have adopted decision-making models where parents are regarded as responsible for such life-support decisions, while in France physicians are commonly considered the decision makers. Grounded theory qualitative methodology. Four pediatric intensive care units (two in France and two in Quebec, Canada). Thirty-one parents of critically ill children; nine physicians and 13 nurses who cared for their children. None. Semistructured interviews were conducted. In France, physicians were predominantly the decision makers for treatment decisions. In Quebec, decisional authority practices were more varied; parents were the most common decision maker, but sometimes it was physicians, while for some decisional responsibility depended on the type of decision to be made. French parents appeared more satisfied with their communication and relationship experiences than Quebec parents. French parents referred primarily to the importance of the quality of communication rather than decisional authority. There was no relationship between parents' actual responsibility for decisions and their subsequent guilt experience. It was remarkable that a certain degree of medical paternalism was unavoidable, regardless of the legal and ethical norms that were in place. This may not necessarily harm parents' moral experiences. Further research is required to examine parental decisional experience in other pediatric settings.

Literature describing effective population interventions related to the pregnancy, birth, and post-birth care of international migrants, as defined by them, is scant. Hence, we sought to determine: 1) what processes are used by migrant women to respond to maternal-child health and psychosocial concerns during the early months and years after birth; 2) which of these enhance or impede their resiliency; and 3) which population interventions they suggest best respond to these concerns.