Poor nutrition habits have been reported in the childcare setting. While the literature advocates the need to carry out ‘Voice of the Child’ research, few studies have explored this methodology with regard to children and food, in particular in the pre-school setting. This article aims to outline the ethical issues raised by a research ethics committee and to discuss the impact of these issues on a study that hoped to determine the food perceptions of children (aged three to four years) (...) within an ongoing nutrition and lifestyle pre-school project in Ireland. Ethical approval was granted for this study but only upon the clarification of two aspects: that only hedonic symbols previously used in the literature could be included in the study; and that parental consent be obtained from both parents of each child. Children were shown food pictures and asked to use the hedonic symbols to answer questions posed to them on the food. Owing to the ethical constraints imposed by the requirement for two-parent consent, seven children, from a potential sample of 85, were eligible to partake in the study. These children did not seem to understand the hedonic symbols recommended for use by the ethics committee, therefore preventing the collection of in-depth qualitative data. The ethical constraints placed on this study impacted on both its design and its methodology and are discussed in relation to national and international ethical guidance and legislation. Future research with children regarding food choice must balance the need for strict ethical standards with the need to explore children’s views on this subject. (shrink)

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 1, Page 76-83, January 2022.

This paper evaluates karl popper's claim in his "conjectures and refutations" that berkeley's "nominalism" is at the root of his "instrumentalist" philosophy of science. the argument of the paper is divided into two parts. in the first part, it is argued that, according to berkeley, "thought" is ontologically prior to "language". in this sense, berkeley's instrumentalism is rooted in a metaphysics of experience and not in a theory of language. in the second part, it is argued that the meaning of (...) 'meaning', according to berkeley, is not governed, as popper suggests, by purely empirical criteria. it is shown that berkeley actually employs several criteria of meaning, only one of which involves the association of a word with a corresponding sense experience. (shrink)