An overview of research on children's rights in primary school: A meta synthesis

Abstract

This paper focused on qualitative research on children's rights in primary schools. This study aimed to reconceptualize and interpret research findings to develop new insights rather than simply summarizing articles. The study adopted meta-synthesis, which is a qualitative research design. The sample consisted of 21 qualitative studies: 14 scientific articles from the International Scientific Indexing (n = 9) or the Social Sciences Citation Index (n = 5), and seven national theses (one Ph.D. thesis and six master's theses). Data were analyzed using inductive content analysis. The results show that most research on students’ rights in primary schools addresses the right to participation but that some studies focus also on raising students’ awareness of the right to education and children's rights. However, there is no research on other rights. Studies also make three recommendations: School staff should have a certain degree of literacy concerning children's rights; schools should adopt approaches based on children's rights; all segments of society should participate in training on children's rights. We also made some suggestions based on our results. © 2021 Elsevier Ltd