(De)Constructing (In)Visible Parent/Guardian Consent Forms: Negotiating Power, Reflexivity, and the Collective Within Qualitative Research

This article focuses on the role of collective reflexivity within a year-long ethnographic study examining Black and Latino/Latina urban youth’s negotiations of college going in and out of school contexts. Through collective reflexivity, the parent/guardian consent form is examined as a methodological tool of data collection and a written representational text that hinders and/or facilitates access to Latino/Latina youth as research participants. After Puerto Rican and Dominican families did not return parent/guardian consent forms, the authors reconstituted the form as a site for feminist critical policy analysis. In (de)constructing the form, varied cultural perspectives of credibility, trust, authority, and reciprocity among Latino/Latina participants, the institutional review board, and the research team are analyzed, negotiated, and transformed. Throughout this process of creating a culturally responsive form, the authors negotiate language as power, recognize and implement cultural relevance as an ethic of research, and reconceptualize audience(s) within reciprocal matrices of power.