Power and Pitfalls of Youth Participation in Community-Based Action Research

Abstract

Youth-led action research can be a powerful means to inform and catalyze community organizing and revitalization. This article presents a case study of youth-led action research to improve educational and recreational resources in a diverse low-income neighborhood in San Francisco. It analyzes this case through a set of three matrices to evaluate the quality and impacts of youth participation in action research. The first matrix uses the dimensions of youth authority over decision-making and youth inclusion in successive phases of the action research to describe the scope and scale of the youth participation. The second matrix uses the alignment of the youth participation model with organizational capacity and community change objectives to assess the overall quality of the youth participation. Finally, impacts on youth participants and on community or policy change are measured to understand effectiveness of the participation. This analysis suggests that practitioners and scholars of participatory research carefully consider the resources and program design necessary to support sustainable and effective participatory action research over time. It also points to the need for long-term commitments by funders to efforts that engage youth in meaningful community change.