Creating access or limiting authenticity? An examination of the potential and pitfalls of school-based Youth-Participatory Action Research

Purpose The past 30 years has seen an increase in the use of youth participatory action research (YPAR), but research into YPAR is, paradoxically, adult-centric, with adult-led capacity building (Cullen and Walsh, 2020). The purpose of this study is to compare young people’s perspectives of YPAR outcomes to those identified in adult-centric research and articulate the potential of youth-led capacity building to improve YPAR processes and research outputs. Design/methodology/approach Working alongside young people undertaking YPAR in a secondary school, the authors use qualitative methods – focus group, mind maps and research journals – to promote young people’s participation in the exploration of youth-led capacity building. Findings Undertaking thematic analysis, the authors have two key findings: engaging young people in research into YPAR shifts the research focus from individual to collective outcomes and drawing upon young people’s prior understandings of research methods and ethics has the potential to promote critical capacity building. Originality/value The authors contribute to the literature on YPAR processes and research by demonstrating why future research into YPAR should involve young people in participatory roles, to promote critical capacity building and, ultimately, improve the quality of YPAR itself.

This dissertation examines the communicative dimensions of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), with particular attention to the power dynamics embedded in the processual and relational aspects of the research process. Through a meta-level examination of a nearly two-year YPAR project, this study illuminates how communication can function for YPAR practitioners as they navigate YPAR's complex power structures, thereby addressing a significant gap in existing literature. The study employs Braun and Clarke's thematic analysis to reveal nuanced findings in two key areas. First, it identifies the communicative complexities of enacting multiple adult roles within YPAR, including those of "superior" adult, facilitator, educator, and trusted adult. This analysis introduces the novel "Spectrum of Adult Control" as a preliminary conceptual tool for understanding power fluctuations in YPAR practice, highlighting how practitioner flexibility and strategic role pivoting are essential to achieving YPAR's emancipatory aims. Second, the dissertation explores efforts to establish a confirming relational climate for youth co-researchers, applying Dailey's confirmation theory, Gibb's typology of defensive communication, and Wood's framework of confirming-disconfirming communication. This theoretical integration offers new insights into how relational dynamics influence participation and agency within YPAR collectives. The study makes significant contributions to both communication studies and Critical/YPAR scholarship by articulating the intricate intersection between processual and relational power dynamics.

Bullying is a persistent problem in schools today, with developmental and socioemotional consequences. Multi-tiered interventions, such as School-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SW-PBIS), have been developed to decrease bullying by improving school climate. However, effects of SW-PBIS are stronger in elementary school than middle and high school, and effects are weaker for marginalized student groups. Aligning SW-PBIS with adolescent developmental needs and promoting systems change through youth participatory action research (YPAR) may improve the developmental fit of SW-PBIS for middle and high school students and strengthen its equity impact. In YPAR, youth conduct research on areas that are important to them and take data-driven action to improve their lives. In this paper, we utilize a qualitative instrumental multiple case study approach to identify similarities between YPAR and SW-PBIS and the value added of YPAR to SW-PBIS implementation. The two cases are from school districts chosen for their unique implementation of YPAR with SW-PBIS in middle and high schools. We used a general inductive approach to analyze field notes, documents, and interviews with school and district staff. We found that YPAR enhanced SW-PBIS implementation at the middle and high school level through alignment with adolescent developmental needs. Youth participatory action research also promoted equity through youth-led or youth–adult partnered assessment and data-driven decision-making, providing YPAR with the opportunity to improve the challenges SW-PBIS faces in decreasing disproportionality in academic outcomes for marginalized students. We provided examples to integrate YPAR with SW-PBIS at Tiers One through three.

Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is oftentimes cited as a method guided by social justice principles to uplift youth voice and pursue youth priorities in research. However, to uphold these principles, YPAR researchers must address how youth and adults alike negotiate power differentials to be equal partners in research and scholarship. We explore YPAR power sharing through a reflexive thematic analysis of in-depth, semi-structured interviews (n = 42) and focus groups (n = 2) conducted at three timepoints (baseline, mid-point, and exit) with youth (n = 8) and adult (n = 6) researchers engaged in a YPAR exploring health equity at a large, safety-net hospital. Our analyses suggest that both youth and adult researchers negotiate power dynamics in a YPAR at every stage of the project. YPAR researchers made four recommendations to negotiate power: 1) preserve time for relationship building, 2) structure group expectations, 3) require training for adults working with youth of color, and 4) designate youth-only spaces. This study provides an in-depth analysis of youth and adult reflections on power across a YPAR project. Our findings indicate that YPAR requires significant investment in resources, including time to reflect on and process power, transparent and structured expectations, and ongoing training to uphold principles of YPAR.

Critical scholarship in sport for development (SfD) advocates transformative research to disrupt the historical colonising view of sport as a vehicle to acculturate people into the values and norms of dominant Western culture. Youth participatory action research (YPAR) involves youth throughout the research process and consequently has the potential to challenge hegemonic forms of knowledge production in SfD. In reality, however, authentic engagement of co-researchers in the research process is often largely confined to data collection. This article draws on the decolonising lens as a theoretical framework to examine tensions, possibilities, and power relations that researchers and co-researchers encounter when co-designing and implementing YPAR in SfD. The project comprised a sixteen-week YPAR in a community-based football programme in Melbourne, Australia. Data collection comprised weekly collaborative meetings, observations collected as field notes, artefacts produced by participants, interviews, and reflective meetings. Findings centred on three themes: (a) finding sensitive ways to navigate the tensions of building trust and rapport; (b) negotiating the struggle between the co-researchers and the coaches about the use of space within the sport context; and (c) the challenges of relinquishing power in research and knowledge production, as reflected in our collective struggle to communicate to participants the value of YPAR for themselves and their communities. The findings challenge a romantic view that YPAR is guaranteed to be an empowering experience for young people; instead, they foreground the complexities and messiness of the process of sharing power with co-researchers in SfD. We conclude by advocating for critical, reflexive YPAR with explicit social transformation objectives to work toward the co-production of knowledge with young people.

Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) involves a youth-adult partnered or youth-led process of inquiry, critical reflection, and action to reduce inequities in areas important to youth with lived experience. YPAR has been linked to multi-level benefits, such as increased school connectedness, enhanced relationships between youth and adults, and policy changes. Most YPAR projects are conducted as electives in schools or afterschool programs, meaning that youth opt in and are likely already interested in social change. Less is known about the YPAR implementation process in more informal community settings with young adults who are not being served by traditional systems (e.g., public schools) and YPAR with specific populations, such as youth who have experienced family member incarceration. To fill this gap, we provided a step-by-step implementation guide of our curriculum, stages of research, and adaptations to YPAR with young adults who experienced family member incarceration, graduated from an alternative school, and worked in the community. We also provided lessons learned from both facilitator and young adult researcher perspectives to aid youth workers, facilitators, and others engaged in community practice with youth in the implementation of YPAR with this unique population and setting.

BackgroundThis paper aims to inform practice for educational psychologists and other professionals who seek to facilitate youth participatory action research (YPAR) in schools. Youth participatory action research is founded on the assumption that young people are capable of being researchers who can co‐create knowledge and act to change the world. It is a worldview as well as a research approach and can be initiated to co‐produce knowledge, facilitate critical thinking, promote the evaluation of social systems and/or act against social oppression.MethodsWe (a) outline the origins of YPAR and review crucial methodological elements of YPAR found in the literature, (b) support practitioners to use a YPAR approach in UK schools using a real‐world example to apply theory to practice and (c) critically discuss outcomes and challenges of facilitating YPAR. An ongoing YPAR project, Breaking the Silence (BtS), facilitated by social enterprise States of Mind and IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society will be outlined within the paper.ResultsBtS demonstrates the power of YPAR to promote the voices of young people, and to allow them to democratically develop action plans that challenge existing education structures. Youth researchers have presented their findings at several conferences and through a national newspaper. They continue to work alongside trade unions and other organisations to push for educational reform. However, the project has demonstrated several challenges and risks of facilitating YPAR. For example, facilitators were not always aware when youth researchers felt they had less meaningful involvement. Facilitators also found it challenging to collaboratively analyse data.ConclusionsThe project indicates that YPAR has the potential to be a democratic, empowering approach that can be brought more widely into the field of education. However, careful considerations are needed by facilitators to mitigate the challenges of the process.

The article uses theory and qualitative evidence to show how youth participatory action research (YPAR) can advance educational equity. YPAR engages young people and adult allies in research and action on issues in their schools and communities. Interviews with over two dozen YPAR researchers—students and partner teachers—elaborate the mechanisms through which school-based YPAR can affect equity, including through direct changes to policy and practice as a result of YPAR actions, a school culture that values student experiences, transformative teacher-student relationships, and improved individual outcomes for participants. To help theorize a theory of change, we draw on Doreen Massey’s space theory to explain how YPAR done in schools can transform culture, relationships, practice, and policy. Further, we suggest how YPAR can be infused in schools.

Though community-based participatory research (CBPR) boasts a robust history, challenges to conducting such work ethically and equitably remain. Common difficulties, such as addressing power dynamics and navigating mutuality, are heightened when doing participatory research with young people, specifically youth participatory action research (YPAR). Additional obstacles also emerge when engaging in such research as junior scholars, who lack tenure and occupy more precarious positions within academia. To elucidate these hurdles and illuminate the labor required to traverse them, we draw upon our experiences as early career academics facilitating YPAR projects with young people who have been historically marginalized. Employing an autoethnographic approach, we utilize qualitative data sources including field notes and reflective memos, from which three themes emerged after iterative rounds of reflection and review. Through descriptive vignettes, we unpack how we attended to positionality and power, interrogated shared benefit and mutuality, and engaged with the unique complexities of working with young people-as informed by our specific identities. In examining our experiences and their alignment with prior research, we aim to expand upon existing literature that has explored best practices within CBPR, but with a specific focus on youth-adult partnerships and consideration of the realities of junior scholars. It is our hope that this discussion will support early career researchers who wish to conduct YPAR but are unsure how to do so given their particular positionalities, by making visible the often-invisible work involved.

Practitioners and scholars have argued that youth participatory action research (YPAR) challenges systemic injustice in education, as youth and adults research mechanisms of oppression and propose recommendations. However, oftentimes YPAR does not lead to new policies, as institutional decision-makers ignore youth’s moral pleas and empirical evidence. In this conceptual article, we propose a consideration of the ways in which YPAR can mobilize power bases using youth organizing and institutionally sanctioned decision-making. We argue that being attuned to power bases provides YPAR groups a more reliable means, in comparison to moral pleas, to move from YPAR findings to shifts in policy and practice.

We provide an overview of diverse forms of youth participation, with a focus on youth participatory action research (YPAR) and its synergies with life course intervention research to promote healthier development for young people and across the life span. We analyze why YPAR matters for research, practice, and policies related to the systems and settings in which young people develop. We also illustrate how young people perform YPAR work to improve the developmental responsiveness and equity of school and health systems, including descriptions of an innovative youth-led health center in Rwanda and a long-standing and evolving integration of YPAR into public high schools in the United States. We then briefly consider the adult capacities needed to do this work well, given that YPAR challenges typical youth-adult power relationships and broader assumptions about who can generate expert knowledge. We consider the alignment and potential challenges for integration of life course intervention research as well as YPAR and next steps for research and practice at this intersection.

Youth participatory action research (YPAR) is a form of critical participatory action research that provides young people with opportunities to identify injustices in their current social realities, to gather and analyze data about these phenomena, and to determine actions that will begin to rectify their negative outcomes. A growing body of evidence suggests that YPAR projects improve outcomes for individual youth as well as the organizations/settings they act on. Despite this, the extent to which YPAR can and should be used in institutions that reproduce dominant cultural power dynamics remains a subject of debate. Building on recent studies that explore the tensions inherent in school-based YPAR projects, in this theoretical essay Gretchen Brion-Meisels and Zanny Alter put three fundamental tenets of YPAR—participation, purpose, and level of analysis—into conversation with each other. Illustrating their points using examples from an ongoing YPAR project that explores barriers to on-time graduation at an urban high school, they describe the ways in which these tenets are central to YPAR projects and identify several elements of schooling that complicate decision making around these fundamental ideas.

In this paper, we explore how youth participatory action research methods serve as a means of uncovering and addressing hidden curricula in schools. To illuminate, we present an example of one school-based youth participatory action research project in which high school students examined racism and sexism in their school. We discuss both the successes and challenges of youth participatory action research as a methodological approach to address inequity in schools.

The purpose of this chapter is to consider the use of youth participatory action research (YPAR) in middle school settings. Developmentally, middle school students traverse a period of identity formation shaped by interactions with peers and the larger ecosystem, including familial values and traditions as well as the greater community and society, making YPAR an intriguing approach to support their development. The authors offer a case study that illustrates YPAR as a multimodal process with positive youth development outcomes for students. The authors also offer recommendations for how school counselors can engage in YPAR with middle school students. The authors start at the individual level, with student voices being centered and elevated, with attention to improving personal and community circumstances while simultaneously building coping and collective healing strategies to support capacity for cocreating equitable systems and practices.

Youth development programs often provide young people with science learning experiences. We argue for reframing youth science learning from a focus on individual scientific literacy to an emphasis on collective scientific literacy—community science—to support young people in using science to address issues in their lives and communities. We provide examples from youth participatory action research (YPAR), one community science pedagogical approach. The YPAR model supports youth in deciding upon an environmental, economic, or social issue; designing and implementing research; and using their research findings to improve their community. We implemented YPAR with eight cohorts of youth over three years at five schools in Northern California. Using data generated from educator interviews and youth focus groups and analyzed with inductive thematic analysis, we explored what youth and educators reported about science engagement and learning. While YPAR projects offered opportunities for youth to strengthen scientific literacy, youth did not join a YPAR program because it was science education. Instead, as youth selected a personally meaningful topic, they began to see how they might affect community change. Engaging learners in relevant educational experiences situated in authentic community issues may improve motivation for deeper and sustained participation in science learning. Our YPAR example demonstrated an approach to learning STEM in youth development programs by ensuring relevancy and connection to community.