This article draws attention to the ethical nuances of conducting participatory research with children and young people growing up in a popular tourist destination in Australia. It responds to calls for more reflexively oriented approaches to documenting the ethical dimensions of qualitative research, particularly with children. Prolonged engagement in the field facilitated a deeper understanding of young people’s lived experiences and the challenges they face in negotiating identity, belonging and connection with community. Findings reveal there are a number of important benefits when actively involving young people in research. With the democratisation of the research process, however, comes an increased ethical responsibility which requires a reflexive and relational approach if meaningful and inclusive participation is to be achieved.

Over recent decades, the evolving field of childhood studies has contributed significantly to the theorisation of childhood and to research seeking to understand children’s lives and experiences in different contexts. This article traces some of the key theoretical developments within childhood studies by means of a scoping study of peer-reviewed, scholarly journals and books published between 2010 and 2018. The aim of the review was to explore the theoretical and empirical contributions of childhood studies beyond its early foundational tenets. A number of emerging tensions were identified and these are explored in this article.

Children and young people’s voices have often been neglected in tourism research, and this is particularly the case when exploring tourism from the host community’s perspective. The lack of children and young people in tourism research has been attributed to the slow engagement and adoption of alternative and critical methodologies which open up new and fresh ways of interpreting reality. The paper aims to explore the potential for participatory film to uncover the perspectives of marginalised members of the community such as children and young people. We also discuss the use of participatory film as an epistemic philosophy, and as a post-disciplinary form of methodology (or ‘postmethodology’) which is ideologically grounded. The findings suggest that children and young people feel strongly about their community and display feelings of anger and frustration towards tourists who are perceived to not respect the community and the environment. The methodological contribution of this paper lies in the use of an innovative and voice-generative participatory visual method to empower young people to actively participate in tourism research.

In this review article, tourism is recognized as a powerful force of change for host communities. The authors maintain that many empirical studies of residents' perceptions of tourism have argued that tourism has the ability to transform the lives of locals who inhabit a given destination region, generating both positive and negative economic, environmental, and sociocultural impacts there. However, the authors suggest that the focus of these received studies has been placed on the perceptions and experiences of adult residents, resulting in an absence of research that examines how young residents view, perceive, and adapt to tourism in their communities. To address this gap, this review article critically analyzes the role of young residents in Tourism Studies to date. An inventory of 30 previous studies that focused on young residents in tourism research was compiled and analyzed. Adapting a framework of the presence and role of Indigenous people in tourism research, the authors classified these articles into three categories—namely, the silent, the acknowledged, and the youth-focused. In this inspection, key findings identified the lack of children's and young people's agency and voice, providing a theoretically driven undercurrent guiding future inquiry and developing a pathway toward new “voice-generative” methods. The authors recommend that the specific approaches that they identify for deployment in the field should be ethically sensitive to the needs of children and young people and thereby be more accommodating in their capacity to develop and enhance discourse on youth in tourism.

This paper explores how the socio-cultural milieu of a community may foster a sense of environmental stewardship among children and young people. Ethnographic fieldwork, carried out in a popular tourist destination in Australia, revealed that the overt impacts of tourism activity such as littering provoke negative feelings among children and young people; these perceptions can in turn translate into a sensitivity towards the environment. While debated in some circles, a Significant Life Experiences (SLE) lens is useful in understanding children and young people’s lived experiences of – and sensitivity to - environmental issues in the communities where they are raised. SLE is employed in this article to explore how a sense of stewardship towards the environment is developed among children and young people growing up in a tourist destination. Findings suggest they actively contribute to protecting the environment in a variety of ways from regular beach clean ups and educating visiting tourists to participating in rallies and anti-development protests.