Engaging With Children: Why We Must Continue to Learn From Every Study We Undertake

This paper examines researchers' use of visual methods and arts-based activities, when researching with children who have rare diseases, about their experiences of happiness, fulfilment, and resilience. Their perspectives were sought in order that a tailored 'Bank of Happiness' intervention be tested to investigate whether this approach could promote children's wellbeing and resilience in this setting and applied more widely in the future. In this reflection article, we focus on methods rather than findings, to examine more closely children's participation in research, on the advantages and challenges of techniques we selected that included collaborative arts-based activities, photography, and photo-elicitation. We want this paper to contribute to the ongoing dialogue about working with children in the context of research. We offer an exploration of the '5Cs', 'Connection', 'Creativity', 'Collaboration', 'Consideration', and 'Congruence', that has helped us to reflect on our study, to reinforce what worked well and what must feature in our ongoing studies, as well as other elements that need more work, more reflection, to be tested and evaluated in future studies.