UX Research with Minors: Consent vs. Assent

Why Read This from an HCI Perspective

This article explains how to separate and handle legal consent and participation assent in UX research involving minors, and it lays out practical standards for session operations, compensation, and caregiver involvement. From an HCI perspective, its value goes beyond procedural guidance: it shows how to embed autonomy and safety for vulnerable participants directly into research design. If you’re a product team working on touchpoints with child users, this is immediately useful.

CIT's Commentary

From a CIT perspective, the core contribution of this piece is that it translates the idea that ‘minors are not just small adult participants’ into operational procedures. Separating consent and assent is not merely a matter of an ethics checklist; it’s a matter of interaction design aligned with developmental stages. In particular, the way it proposes different levels of caregiver involvement by age demonstrates strong context sensitivity in HCI research. That said, in real-world settings, you also need to consider differences in caregiver roles across cultures, children’s language abilities, and how trust is formed in online remote sessions to make the approach more robust. CIT interprets this as going one step further: the way explanations help children understand that they can ‘refuse’ should itself be treated as a research target.

Questions to Consider While Reading

• Q.In research with minors, how should verbal assent be designed differently by age group, and how can we verify comprehension?
• Q.What research protocols are effective for minimizing social desirability bias that can arise when a caregiver sits in on the session?
• Q.When providing toys or gift cards instead of monetary compensation, how should we assess the impact on children’s autonomy and the ethical appropriateness?