💎 YPAR Gems: Tips & Resources for Coordinating a Youth Participatory Action Research Project 💎

Youth-Adult Partnership Blog Series ‘23

Looking to engage young people in community-based research? Here are some tips and resources that our youth researchers and team members on this project found generative and most useful. This blog was crafted by Omar Khan, the former YPAR Project Coordinator and now Network Engagement Manager at Student Success Network.

Transforming Our Approach: Research and Social Emotional Learning

At Student Success Network (SSN), one of our foundational beliefs is that youth perspective and experience should be at the core of decision-making processes in our Network. Fostering Youth-Adult Partnership (Y-AP) within our approach dates back to 2017, the year in which we debuted our Youth Advisory Council, which evolved into the Elevating Youth Voice (EYV) program the following year. 

Since our inception in 2013, gathering data and conducting research to support Network capacity building for continuous improvement and strengthening youth SEL competencies has been essential to our approach. Our seminal work in this field is our youth SEL survey tool, utilized across our Network organizations to better understand bright spots and areas for growth in cultivating youth SEL competencies. Through our SEL research, we supported organizational capacity to strengthen outcomes for young people. While this work was deeply impactful, upon further reflection, we realized that we were contributing to a pattern that happens too often where research is conducted on young people rather than with young people.

Our 2021-22 YPAR Project

To explore an approach where young people are the researchers rather than the researched, we piloted a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project. Not only did this project tap into our Y-AP principles, it moved us along on our SEL journey from traditional SEL to Transformative SEL (tSEL). The latter consists of building social emotional learning skills as young people and adults build strong, respectful, and lasting relationships to engage in co-learning (CASEL).

Our YPAR project consisted of 12 former and current NYC public high school students as youth researchers. We engaged students from diverse backgrounds, inclusive of various learning styles and needs. Additionally, as we were still in the pandemic era, our project was completely virtual. Together, we co-created a research design for their selected topic of mental health and wellbeing amongst NYC public high school students. From creating survey questions to conducting interviews, our youth researchers led the data collection process. This process consisted of 8 interviews with and 80 survey responses from NYC high school students and allowed us to identify prominent stressors impacting their mental health. While our project ultimately was a success, yielding many important findings and identifying areas for further action based on the research, the journey to get there was rocky and we experienced significant challenges along the way.

Some of our youth researchers and SSN team members in a virtual meeting.

The Gems

Given that this was a pilot project, we were in a space of ongoing learning, continuously reflecting on the successes and challenges we encountered to form an equitable and authentic youth-adult partnership.

We wanted to highlight what methods and activities actually worked for us and truly allowed young people to take the lead on this project. Although not every material was a success, we believe there were some notable gems that moved our research process along and could be useful to our Network and the broader youth development field! These gems will fall under three critical aspects of the project: Relationship building, pedagogical process, and continuous improvement.

(1) Relationship Building

How did we support healthy relationships between youth researchers and team members?

Establishing connection and a sense of trust with youth researchers is the first and most critical step of a successful YPAR project. We heavily relied on SEL approaches that encouraged vulnerability, transparency, and humility. While embarking on a new journey for all parties involved, we wanted to establish a relationship that allowed space for mistakes, grace and learning. 

As a team, we leaned into this most prominently by being as transparent as possible with the issues we were navigating with the project. We framed this as a learning experience for everyone and tried to lessen the sense of urgency to have intentional time for co-creation and equitable decision making.

Both co-creation and equitable decision-making require the use of Y-AP principles, which we began unpacking at the beginning of our project. Early sessions were used to not only establish a relationship with young people, but help us all understand how we function within this relationship. Our youth researchers engaged with case studies demonstrating effective youth-adult partnerships, visually seeing them modeled through real-life application. Team members engaged in discussion amongst researchers to unlearn practices and behaviors rooted in adultism and align around a Y-AP model that supports a youth-led and staff-supported project.

Additionally, it is important to be intentional about meeting spaces and what they will look like. Throughout the project, we explored various meeting formats and structures. For example, we made sure to organize spaces that were just for youth researchers, which they noted were extremely helpful in feedback. Further, we offered opportunities for the group to connect in-person and provided the option of engaging in one-on-ones with SSN team members. It’s also worth noting that when we were in group spaces together, we would have community agreements outlined and engage in grounding prompts/questions. A notable resource created by a Network member, Sadie Nash Leadership Project, was the Go-Around Questions Living List.

Given that we were co-designing a research project, there were a handful of decisions to be made. It is absolutely critical to establish a standardized and equitable approach around decision-making processes. A resource we created to break the ice around group consensus is YPAR University, which requires the group to decide which of three fictional qualifying applicants to YPAR University they will accept, waitlist and reject. The group, which can include adult staff or just youth, must align around a final decision and then reflect on the process of doing so.

Lastly, this resource with decision-making model options provided by Jovida Ross and Weyam Ghadbian in their Turning Towards Each Other Workbook allowed us to tangibly talk about decision-making processes that we could utilize together.

(2) Pedagogical Process

How did we engage in different ways of learning to support the group?

Understanding the best way to engage youth researchers in learning was a necessary step for us. At first, our team took a more prescriptive approach when it came to preparing for sessions—creating slide decks, agendas, and lectures. However, after feedback from researchers and internal reflection on how we may have been enabling adultism through session design, we made an intentional shift. Researchers wanted sessions to be more collaborative, so we aimed to create a model that elevated youth researcher perspectives and voices without requiring them to engage in pre-work or prep for the session.

We started from scratch and had a session where we just allowed for things to naturally take course. This allowed us to understand the organic flow of our meetings that would exist without any extensive planning. Building off this, we investigated to understand the true avenues in which youth researchers needed support to move our project forward. Smriti Lama, one of our youth researchers and summer interns, stated in her YPAR reflection blog that researchers “found the lack of restrictions quite challenging.” While they didn’t want sessions structured like school, researchers needed guidance for decision-making and project management. 

Our response to this was to utilize a toolbox approach, which consists of outlining a few low-effort, high-impact resources for the specific project item at hand. We provided researchers with total autonomy to explore these resources and align around one that would be most effective for them. Additionally, we built in session time for action in synchronous meetings, moving away from them being solely facilitated or discussion-based. This also helped researchers manage their time as they navigated school and the research project simultaneously.

As the project evolved, we began needing dedicated capacity for specific work streams, such as conducting interviews, managing/tracking data collection, and analyzing data. These workstreams were also learning opportunities for researchers, and we understood that some may be more interesting than others. With that being said, we had an intentional way of dividing and conquering workstreams to leverage the skills of all program participants (including SSN team members) and the interests/experiences of the researchers. We used a committee structure for each workstream, which also provided a foundation for the evolution of this work into a summer internship program that was available to all project participants.

(3) Continuous Improvement

How did we continue to hold ourselves accountable to ensure we were doing what we aimed to accomplish?

The majority of the evaluation plan for this project was improvement focused. Instead of waiting until the end of the project and asking participants to reflect back, questions were asked at various and frequent times throughout. It became a cyclical process of data gathering, synthesizing, and implementing change. We were able to better understand perceived areas for improvement and possible gaps that may exist to implement these changes in real-time. Youth and adult participant feedback was collected continuously through surveys, reflection circles (focus groups), interviews, and session-specific feedback forms, with the option to remain anonymous. 

We purposefully gave youth participants ample choice in how they wanted to provide feedback, including opting out of this portion entirely. Having a flexible evaluation framework, yielded a more holistic and comprehensive view of this project. At the culmination, youth were asked for an overarching reflection either in the form of a survey, interview, reflection circle or any method of their choosing. One youth participant wrote a song, another reflected in narrative format, and a third chose art pieces to show what the YPAR project meant to them. Not only was the evaluation improvement-focused, it was also transformative—allowing youth to express themselves through a creative format that felt meaningful to them. 

Lastly, and arguably the most effective feedback structure was our YPAR Advisory Committee. This consisted of 2-3 youth researchers that attended a few of the adult team’s planning meetings to provide input around the agenda and curriculum for weekly meetings and the overall program. They also provided asynchronous feedback via a specific feedback document created for each session, along with bi-weekly youth researcher feedback forms—both of which were available to all youth. This committee was core to the execution of our project. Also, participants were monetarily compensated for their time and were able to build their professional skills in collaboration with our adult team!

TL;DR - Our Insights Summarized

In our journey from traditional Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) to Transformative SEL (tSEL), our 2021-22 Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project stands as a testament to the power of fostering true Youth-Adult Partnership (Y-AP). This endeavor challenged the status quo by making young people not the subjects of research, but the researchers themselves. 

Relationship building emerged as the cornerstone of our approach. Establishing trust, vulnerability, and transparency was paramount, allowing us to navigate this new territory with humility and grace. Meeting spaces were thoughtfully designed, offering dedicated spaces for youth researchers, in-person interactions, and grounding prompts. Our process around decision-making became standardized and inclusive.

We allowed sessions to flow naturally, and shifted our pedagogical approach from a prescriptive model to a collaborative one—with a focus on empowering youth researcher perspectives. 

Continuous improvement was at the heart of our project evaluation. Youth participants had the freedom to choose how they provided feedback, promoting a holistic view of the project's progress.

Upon reflecting on our journey, we believe these critical aspects of relationship building, pedagogical process, and continuous improvement will serve as guiding gems for our Network and the broader youth development field. This pilot project has not only led to important findings but also set the stage for a more equitable and authentic partnership between youth and adults in our ongoing work.

Check out this one-pager on our YPAR project findings related to mental-health and wellbeing following the pandemic in NYC public high schools. We’re always here to answer questions or share further insights with you: info@ssn-nyc.org.