Screening for Parental Consent? Trans Youth and Informed Consent in Academic Research

Abstract

Informed consent has been widely discussed and debated in methodological literature. When it comes to conducting research with those under the age of 16, the general rule that UK university ethics committees tend to follow is that parental consent should be sought. In this article, I discuss my experience researching with transgender young people: a group who may find parental consent particularly problematic. I discuss the ethical challenges involved in ensuring that young people are able to give informed consent when parental consent may not be safe to obtain. This article advances sociological research by evaluating the use of a ‘screening process’ to assess whether it is safe for a young person to obtain consent from their parents. While a screening process has ethical benefits as it avoids excluding young people who cannot obtain parental consent safely, I argue that a screening process is not necessarily the best way forward as it does little to overcome key inherent issues with mandatory parental consent: namely the assumptions about the age at which one is deemed as competent to give consent. I argue that more productive conversations are needed about how to ensure that young people can consent to taking part in research when parental consent is not possible, especially in the context of online research.

Introduction

Informed consent is defined as the ‘permission granted in the knowledge of the possible consequences’ (Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 2023). Gaining informed consent from research participants is understood to be one key component of good ethical practice when conducting social research (see British Educational Research Association, 2024; British Sociological Association, 2017) and therefore most UK university ethics boards require researchers to consider how they are going to ensure that participants give informed consent to take part in a study. When it comes to conducting research with those under the age of 16, an additional step is often required: parental consent (see British Sociological Association, 2017). This is because children are understood as only possessing the ability to assent, or as Cotrim et al. (2021) explain, ‘express the willingness to participate in research’ (p. 2) (see also Dockett and Perry, 2011; Spriggs, 2023). While children are able to assent, it is parents who are believed to have the ability and competency to provide informed consent (Alderson and Morrow, 2011; Heath et al., 2007). A key factor that determines who is able to assent and who is able to consent is the term ‘competency’ which in the UK, relates to the Gillick Competence framework which is underpinned by the Fraser Guidelines (Gillick v West Norfolk and Wisbech Area Health Authority, 1985). Gillick Competence refers to ‘a functional ability to make a decision’ on the basis that one has ‘an ability to understand [. . .] that there is a choice to be made and that choices have consequences’ (Griffith, 2016: 245 – see also NSPCC, 2022). Gillick Competence was developed in a medical setting for the purpose of allowing young people under the age of 18 to gain access to contraception without parental permission, and it is now used more widely in youth work and research settings (Heath et al., 2007) albeit as a guiding principle and not a legally binding requirement (UK Research and Innovation, 2021).

The requirement that parental consent should be gained when researching with children and young people under the age of 16 has been widely debated in sociological literature (see for example: Coyne, 2010; Dalli and Te One, 2012; Heath et al., 2007; Powell and Smith, 2009). There are many reasons why researchers may find it problematic to seek parental consent when conducting research with children and young people, especially if the research topic is sensitive (Heath et al., 2007). As the Stonewall School Report 2017 states, only ‘two in five LGBT young people (40 per cent) have an adult at home they can talk to about being LGBT’ (Bradlow et al., 2017: 7). A similar report on transgender lives in the UK states that only 26% of trans people ‘say that all their family members who know that they are trans, are supportive’ (Bachmann and Gooch, 2018: 14). Therefore, when conducting research with young trans people, it is problematic to assume that all young trans people will be able to seek parental consent safely.

One way to establish whether parental consent may be safe to obtain is through a ‘screening’ process. Here, the term screening refers to the process of filtering who can and who cannot seek parental consent safely. In the context of social sciences research, the term ‘screening’ has been used in survey-based research and systematic reviews, to filter participants or materials for in/exclusion based on a determined set of factors (see Krnic Martinic et al., 2019; Murphy, 2008). ‘Screening’ is also a practice that is widely used in medical and health contexts to identify individuals who are likely to develop a particular disease (Armstrong and Eborall, 2012). To date, there has been little discussion in existing literature about the use of a screening process to assess whether parental consent is safe to obtain. There is also an absence of discussion about why parental consent may especially be problematic when conducting research with transgender youth. Therefore, this article offers an original contribution to existing academic debates about informed consent and parental consent.

This article begins by situating my research in the sociological and methodological debates regarding informed consent and parental consent that have emerged in recent decades. I then outline the research design of my particular project and detail the development of a screening process. The main body of this article is dedicated to evaluating the use of a screening process as a tool: it allows those who cannot seek parental consent the opportunity to take part in research but it does little to dispel the problematic assumptions about children and young people’s consent and competency. This article concludes by discussing the implications of a screening process to researching with children and young people and argues that further conversations are needed to assist university ethics boards and researchers to conduct social research with children and young people safely.

Literature review

Discussions about informed consent and parental consent in methodological literature are situated in broader debates about formal ethical approval, university ethics committees and research ethics in practice. On the surface, the main aim of institutional ethics committees is to safeguard prospective participants who may take part in a research project (Hickey et al., 2022). However, scholars have illuminated a discordance between formal ethical approval such as institutional ethics committees who require research to be documented as linear and predictable, and research in practice which is inherently messy, iterative, and complex (see Halse and Honey, 2007; Hammersley, 2015; Loveridge et al., 2023; Mason, 2018). Halse and Honey (2007) argue that these discrepancies can be traced back to the origins of the ethics review processes which were initially implemented for the purpose of reviewing the practices of medical research and were later adopted by other disciplines. Also, arguments have been made to suggest that ethics committees are one component of the rise in regulation in university settings in attempt to protect themselves from litigation and to uphold institutional reputation in an increasingly neo-liberal context (Dingwall, 2012; Hammersley, 2009). There is a risk, then, when it comes to formal ethical review, of academics feeling as if they are simply going through the motions of tick-box, administrative exercises that merely scratch the surface of the ethical considerations in their research practice.

However, there has been increasing recognition that ethics is not something that should only be discussed at the ethical review. As Guillemin and Gillam (2004) explain, there is a distinction between ‘ethics in practice’ as they arise in the field and ‘procedural ethics’ or the formal ethical review: both of which do not necessarily always align. As I have argued elsewhere (see Atherton, 2025), conducting ethical research with young people involves engaging in continuous dynamic reflections throughout the research process. Banks (2016) conceptualises this as ‘ethics work’ and argues that researchers are ‘moral agents’ who partake in such work in everyday instances throughout the research process. This especially relevant to informed consent where there has been increasing recognition of consent as a process that is ongoing (British Sociological Association, 2017; Heath et al., 2007). One area of ongoing debate concerning informed consent is parental consent. As Coyne (2010) explains, mandatory parental consent positions children as incapable and inevitably reliant on others, whereas parents are positioned as knowledgeable enough to make decisions for them. In line with a move towards ethics in practice, emerging research has considered how to engage with the tensions that parental consent brings in practice (Davies, 2008; Sherwood and Parsons, 2021).

Further research has considered some of the specific tensions that arise when mandatory parental consent is proposed for research involving LGBTQ+ youth. Requiring LGBTQ+ youth to obtain parental consent to take part in research where their experiences and identities as LGBTQ+ people will be discussed requires young people to be out to their parents. However, this may not always be safe or practical for young people to do (see discussions by Heath et al., 2009; Pickles, 2020; Smith and Schwartz, 2019). Pickles’ (2020) research on LGBTQ+ youth’s experiences of hate crime discusses one potential way to remove parental consent in such instances. Pickles (2020) explains the implementation of a ‘guardian in loco parentis’ whereby a youth worker who had a close relationship with the young person would act as their guardian and give consent for the LGBT+ young person to participate. For Pickles (2020), although this does not allow young people to consent for themselves, it nevertheless mitigates against issues arising from requiring the parents of the young people to be the ones to give permission for participation.

However, to date, there has been very little discussion about the use of a screening process as a way to determine whether it is safe to seek parental consent. Also, much of the research which has discussed the tensions of mandatory parental consent cited above does so in regards to LGB youth, or LGBTQ+ youth as a whole, (see Reed, 2023 for some exceptions). This article fills such gaps by evaluating the use of a screening process to determine whether parental consent is safe to be sought when conducting research with trans youth. This is a significant contribution to existing debates on informed consent and parental consent in academic research given the specific tensions that parental consent raises for trans youth in particular, some of which are discussed in the next section which outlines the research design of the project from which the screening process evolved.

Researching transgender students’ experiences of secondary school

My PhD research explored the experiences of transgender secondary school students in UK schools (Atherton, 2023). While I recruited teachers and young trans people aged 16 and over from online social media forums, I proposed to recruit young trans people under the age of 16 from local youth groups. Before the COVID-19 lockdowns began in March 2020, I had constructed a research design that contained several elements that relied on face-to-face contact. One aspect of this was interviews and focus groups with young trans people aged 13 to 15. Focus groups would be centred around a creative activity as inspired by the ‘mood-board’ technique (Pimlott-Wilson, 2012): I proposed to ask young trans people to create a collage of their ‘ideal school’ along-side a one-to-one interview which could be a follow-up to the collage or an alternative. The methodology behind this was to provide young people with the opportunity to produce what Renold (2018) has termed ‘darta’; art which provides a rich amount of multi-layered data.

Before any research could be conducted, my university required me to secure ethical approval from the University’s ethical review board. As my proposed research involved participants under the age of 16, university policy meant that I had to seek the highest level of ethical approval at my institution. The application involved an online form and a face-to-face interview. As part of this, I was instructed to detail how I would obtain parental consent for trans youth aged 13 to 15 and the ethical review board provided templates of written participation information sheets and consent forms which I could adapt to the specifics of my own research. While planning this element of the research, several issues with gaining parental consent from young trans people came to light, which I will now turn to discuss in more detail.

One issue with parental consent forms, as highlighted by a youth worker with whom I had established a working relationship with, was the practical difficulty of returning the parental consent forms. Although obtaining physical written consent forms could be a practice issue for many research projects it is perhaps more likely that this practical issue would occur in my case as parents would not be present when the research was taking place and would thus have to sign them at an earlier date for the young people to return. Also, the young trans people would have to attend sessions prior to the focus group in order to receive the parental consent form. This could be problematic as many social groups for LGBTQ+ young people do not require regular attendance but allow people to attend as and when they wish. Similarly, young people attend youth groups as an opportunity for fun, relaxation, and enjoyment (see Formby and Donovan, 2020), away from extra responsibilities and tasks. Therefore, I was concerned that requiring parental consent forms to be returned could create ethical issues by imposing unwanted bureaucratic labour on young trans people themselves.

Another key concern was the risk that mandatory parental consent could compromise the safety and confidentiality of the young trans people taking part in my research. As previously discussed, mandatory parental consent risks ‘outing’ young trans people to their parents and therefore could infringe confidentiality. Also, as Pickles (2020) discusses, any difficulties that young people experience in their home life as a result of being outed cannot be retracted. This is particularly relevant to my case whereby a parental consent form would essentially mean that a young trans people would have to be out, or come out, to their parents which may have long-term implications for the young person beyond my research project. Excluding young trans people under the age of 16 who cannot safely seek parental consent to take part in the research has implications for how far I can understand trans students experiences of secondary school from the perspective of those who are currently experiencing this.

However, not all young trans people are unable to be out to their parents or face discrimination at home (Carlile, 2019). As the ethics committee in my case pointed out, some young trans people do have incredibly supportive parents and therefore concerns about outing and subsequent mistreatment may not be an issue in all cases. In light of this, the ethics committee advised that I should implement a screening process. This is a two-step procedure which would establish whether the young person was ‘out’ to their parents, and whether they would feel comfortable and safe informing their parents about their involvement in the study. If young people answered ‘no’ to one or both of the questions, then parental consent would not be sought immediately. Instead, a competency assessment would be carried out to determine whether the young trans person had the competency to understand the nature of the study and decide for themselves as to whether or not to take part.

As I will go on to explain in more detail, I was unable to use the screening process as COVID-19 restrictions meant that all aspects of my research had to take place online. However, the process of designing the screening process and seeking ethical approval formed the basis of reflexive considerations about parental consent and informed consent in research involving young people. This evaluation is therefore based on my reflexive research practice (Davies, 2008; Kara, 2020; Mason, 2018) that I adopted throughout my PhD fieldwork. This article therefore now turns to evaluate the use of a screening process as a tool to determine whether it is safe to seek parental consent in particular instances of social academic research.

Establishing inclusion and trust

One key advantage of the use of a screening process is that it makes possible for young trans people to consent for themselves to decide whether to take part in research. The competency assessment, which is underpinned by the Gillick Competence (see previous discussion), is particularly beneficial if it is conducted by a qualified youth worker. Youth workers work closely with young people and are able to make an informed decision about their competence (Pickles, 2020). Therefore, the screening process and competency assessment safeguards young people by only allowing them the opportunity to consent for themselves if they are deemed to have the capacity to do so. It also means that young people would only be excluded from research on the basis of lacking capacity to consent, rather than because they are unable to seek parental consent safely, making the research more accessible for young people.

However, this reliance on face-to-face contact for establishing trusting relationships between young people, the researcher, and youth workers can make it unsuitable for online research. This limitation became especially pertinent for my own fieldwork which took place during the COVID-19 lockdowns (March–November 2020). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all aspects of my PhD fieldwork had to take part online for the safety of myself and the participants. The organisation with whom I had been liaising with also temporarily suspended face-to-face activities and replaced them with online meetings. This presented a new ethical challenge; interviewing young people from their home where their parents are likely to be present. In light of this, the ethics committee could not grant me approval to conduct research with young trans people aged 13 to 15 during COVID-19 lockdown conditions due to having to use online methods which bring the possibility of parents being in the background of the call. Ultimately, this meant that research with young trans people aged 13 to 15 had to be postponed until face-to-face contact was safe. The fieldwork for my doctoral project ended in November 2020 when lockdowns in the UK had not yet been lifted indefinitely, and therefore meant that I was unable to conduct any research with those aged 13 to 15.

In this article, I develop an argument to show how even in times when COVID-19 restrictions have been lifted, a screening tool is not a perfect solution to the ethical issues that come with parental consent, be it using online or offline methods. In the next two sections I argue that a screening process which determines whether parental consent is safe to obtain merely upholds existing problems with mandatory parental consent.

Problems with a screening process

Age and consent

First, a screening process does little to dispel the rigid assumptions about age and consent that underpin mandatory parental consent. As Armstrong (2019) argues in the context of medical screening, screening is inherently social, shaped by normative understandings of what factors, and which people, are deemed as acceptable and ‘pass’ the criteria. In the context of my research, the screening process that I designed in particular was underpinned by, and further upheld, very specific normative assumptions about parent-child relationships as fixed and predictable. As previously explained, the screening process only allowed parental consent to not be obtained in two conditions; if the young person was not out to their parents or if they did not feel comfortable to ask their parents for consent. While these are two important considerations, they are nevertheless limited as they may not cover all of the reasons why it would be unsafe for young trans people to obtain parental consent.

Furthermore, rigid assumptions were also made about the age at which a young person has the capability of giving informed consent. In other words, the screening process for those aged 13 to 15 assumes that the ethical risks that warrant the screening process being implicated, are suddenly resolved when the young person turns 16 and is able to consent for themselves. The arbitrary nature of this assumption became most apparent in the case of my research when one young trans person contacted me to take part in an interview, yet I had to tell them to contact me again in a few months’ time once they had turned 16. This illustrates how a screening process could become another way in which ethics becomes performative (see Halse and Honey, 2007): I strongly suspected that interviewing the participant a few months before they turned 16 would not raise any additional ethical concerns to those that would be present when the participant was 16, but I followed the procedure anyway in line with what had been approved by the ethics committee.

Privileging adult perspectives

A second key limitation of mandatory parental consent, which is not resolved by the use of a screening process, is the problematic understandings of competency and consent as something that only adults are capable of. Despite removing mandatory parental consent, the screening process still involves an adult in the consent process, albeit a youth worker rather than a parent. While having a youth worker present could be beneficial as it could ensure that participants have access to support if they need it (Pickles, 2020), I found that there were a number of practical difficulties when establishing relationships with youth workers, especially for doctoral students and early career researchers. For instance, in my own case, I built a relationship with the youth workers and the organisation through my attendance at the LGBTQ+ youth group as a lesbian woman, who at the time, was under the age of 25. However, the youth worker left the organisation part-way through my PhD programme. Such instances may be common for other researchers given the precarious nature of this sector due to lack of secure funding (Formby and Donovan, 2020). This could present issues as researchers would have to establish a new rapport and relationship with another staff member.

As well as practical difficulties, the required presence of a youth worker in the consent assessment and screening process is underpinned by specific understandings of who has the ability to give informed consent. In the case of the screening process, it is the adult youth worker who is understood as possessing these abilities. The limitations of this echo many of the limitations of parental consent as discussed earlier in this article: the competency assessment means that the young person’s participation is only a possibility after adults permit it (Dalli and Te One, 2012; Heath et al., 2007; Powell and Smith, 2009). Similarly, there is the risk that the presence of an adult youth worker may lead the young person to think that they have little choice but to participate (Coyne, 2010; Powell and Smith, 2009). Also, as the very nature of the screening process means that parental consent was still the default option, with revoking it being a ‘plan b’ that could be implemented if certain criteria were met. This still upholds the assumption that parents are best equipped to assess whether their child should be able to take part in research. Therefore, a screening process and a consent assessment which requires the involvement of a youth worker does little to minimise the unequal power dynamics of parental consent.

Conclusion

Ultimately, there is still much work to be done to secure the rights of trans individuals in the UK; one of which is ensuring their right to access and partake in academic research. In this article, I have evaluated the usefulness of a screening process to determine whether parental consent should be sought when conducting research with young trans people under the age of 16. I have explained how a screening process dismantles assumptions about young people and their relationship with their parents: not all young people can seek parental consent safely. Indeed, this was even the case for some young trans people who I interviewed who were aged 16 or over where speaking to their parents about their gender identity was a source of contention (Atherton, 2023). A screening process could therefore provide a useful tool to safeguard young people from harms that may occur as a result of them seeking parental consent. It also provides researchers with a tool to ensure that young people are not excluded from taking part in research by default when parental consent is unsafe to obtain.

While revoking the need for mandatory parental consent in all cases is a step in the right direction to improving the accessibility of research to marginalised groups of young people (such as trans youth), my evaluation in this article reveals inherent problems with a screening process such as the one that I proposed to implement. One key issue with my proposed screening process is its reliance on face-to-face contact for the competency assessment to be conducted. This issue is not unique to research conducted during the time of COVID-19 lockdowns: although COVID-19 restrictions have eased and face-to-face research is now possible again, conducting research with young people online still has many benefits for accessibility and practicality (Hanckel, 2025). Moreover, I have discussed how a screening process that relies on a competency assessment is highly problematic as it does little to erase the issues of mandatory parental consent: assumptions about age, consent and hierarchical adult/child relationships. Being unable to have the opportunity to take part in a research project which offers space for trans young people to voice their experiences, ‘marginalises the marginalised’ (Pickles, 2020: 28) and is reflective of formal ethical review processes created by and for adult researchers (Spencer, 2022).

This article has made several contributions to existing debates in methodological literature about parental consent (see Coyne, 2010; Dalli and Te One, 2012; Heath et al., 2007; Powell and Smith, 2009) by specifically focussing on the use of a screening process in research involving young trans people. My evaluation has led me to argue that a screening process does little to reduce the gaps between research governance held up by the formal ethical review process and ethical research in practice (see previous discussion). Specifically, I have argued that a screening process merely exacerbates the problematic assumptions about competency and consent that are inherent in mandatory parental consent. The shortfalls of a screening process add further support to arguments against mandatory parental consent in research with young LGBTQ+ people (Reed, 2023).

Nevertheless, a screening process may remain a favourable option for formal ethical review processes which have a legal requirement to safeguard young people under the age of 16 from harm and see parental consent as a key way to do this (see previous discussion). While a screening process could be a useful tool as it recognises that not all young people can gain parental consent, it needs considerable work if it is to be implemented. On the basis of my experiences and my evaluation, I argue that those involved in formal ethics review processes, such as ethics committee members and academics should engage in productive conversations and enact changes to protocols and policies that are used and upheld by institutional ethics review boards (Evans et al., 2008; Stablein and Jacobs, 2011). This is an important recommendation in the context of the current organisation of institutional ethical review committees where there is seldom opportunity for discussion between academics and reviewers (Hickey et al., 2022). As my evaluation has recognised the value that professionals from third-party organisations can bring to offering young people an alternative to parental consent (Pickles, 2020; Stablein and Jacobs, 2011), and these conversations should involve those professionals who work with young people.

While it is beyond the scope of this article to detail alternatives to a screening process, my evaluation of my own experience of designing a screening process and my review of existing literature has nevertheless raised important factors to be considered in future discussions. In particular, my evaluation shows that the meanings of consent, harm and competency are key areas where further conversation and engagement is needed as a starting point to reforming institutional ethics policies and procedures concerning children and young people’s involvement in academic research. These discussions will also mean that a screening process does not merely rehearse and uphold the inherent issues with mandatory parental consent. Further consideration is also needed to enable the possibility of conducting these procedures online. This is especially important given the advantages of conducting online research with young LGBTQ+ people (e.g. see Hiebert and Kortes-Miller, 2021; McDermott et al., 2013).