Children are at the heart of Young Lives, and this fieldwork guide describes a set of tools that were developed to collaborate with children involved in the longitudinal qualitative research component of the study. The manual guided the third of four planned rounds of data collection in 2010/11 as part of the longitudinal qualitative research design, woven between rounds of a quantitative household and child survey. We work with two age-groups of children who were aged 9 to 10 and 15 to 16 at the time, in four countries: Ethiopia, India (in the state of Andhra Pradesh), Vietnam and Peru.

Since 2002, Young Lives has used a survey questionnaire to track the well-being and life trajectories of two age cohorts of children across four countries: Ethiopia, India (in the state of Andhra Pradesh), Vietnam and Peru. In 2007, Young Lives initiated a child-focused qualitative component to complement the survey research, working with a sub-group of children drawn from the larger Young Lives sample.

Young Lives is a long-term study of childhood poverty in four developing countries: Ethiopia, India (in the state of Andhra Pradesh), Vietnam and Peru. We are challenging many of the assumptions made about children, both in terms of how they experience poverty and in terms of their roles and capacities as participants in research. We have involved children as young as age 5 in our qualitative research. We maintain that involving them in our research is both ethically and scientifically sound – especially since our research questions focus on the nature and dynamics of childhood poverty.

There are very few studies in developing and low-income countries that combine a child-focus, with survey and qualitative methods, and a longitudinal research design. Young Lives is a fifteen-year mixed-methods study of childhood poverty being carried out in four developing country contexts: Ethiopia, India (in the state of Andhra Pradesh), Vietnam and Peru.