This summary of the ‘Ethics Learning from Young Lives: 20 Years On’ report outlines some of the main ethics challenges during the operationalisation of Young Lives, an ongoing longitudinal, mixed-methods, collaborative study of childhood poverty in four countries that began in 2001.

Many complex ethics questions arise in the conduct of longitudinal research in low- and - middle income countries (LMICs), particularly in studies that involve children and other potentially vulnerable social groups over long periods of time.  Young Lives strives to adhere to agreed ethical standards which emphasise principles of justice, respect and informed consent, and of maximising benefits while avoiding doing harm to the people in our study.  Whist there is a well-developed ethics literature on children and youth in social research, less is published on the le

In this IFS Working Paper, the authors study the relationship between child work and cognitive development in four Low and Middle Income Countries. They address a key weakness in the literature by including children’s full time-use vector in the analysis, which leads to different findings from previous studies which do not distinguish between alternative counter-factual activities. They find child work is only detrimental if it crowds out school/study time rather than leisure.