Researchers Want to Amplify Youth Voices In Their Work. Here’s How to Get Started

Building a future where young people can thrive is at the core of many educators’ work, including in their research, which can be difficult to conduct with the voice of young people in mind. To help make that process easier for researchers, the Center for Digital Thriving — one of the Ed School’s research and innovation labs housed at Project Zero — has collaborated with the HopeLab, Character Lab, and InTandem on a new resource. The Youth Voice Playbook aims to be an all-in-one guide to planning, recruiting, and designing activities to encourage researchers not to forget youth participation in their research.

“We hope that this playbook can provide inspiration, food for thought, and some practical guidance for researchers, nonprofit leaders, funders, program staff, and anyone else who knows that they have much to learn and gain from working more closely with young people,” write the authors.

Four researchers at the Center for Digital Thriving — Eduardo Lara, Emily Weinstein, Beck Tench, and Carrie James — contributed as authors to the Playbook, which includes a number of different approaches and suggestions for incorporating youth voice and perspective into educational research. Chapters include guidelines on recruitment, documentation and reflection, and even the ethics and laws around conducting research with minors. Further resources in each chapter include reflection and planning guides, detailed support materials for researchers, and a primer on pronoun use for LGBTQ+ youth.

“Youth voice has been critical to our own work. Young people’s perspectives have helped us realize who we were unintentionally excluding, when we were missing the mark, and when we weren’t thinking deeply or complexly enough about an issue,” the authors write. “Engaging with youth voices has helped us see totally new ideas, stay nimble and creative, and develop the skill of working intergenerationally.”

Why Youth Voice Is Important

As the playbook notes, involving young people in their research methods is an important way to amplify voice and agency in matters that impact them. It also helps researchers ensure the reliability and validity of their research by continuing to check that it is relevant to young people and their lived experiences. Directly involving young people in research can also mitigate risks of misinterpretation between cultures and generations, help develop new ideas for interventions and resources, and build trust and empowerment of the young people involved with the work itself.

From Preparing to Sharing

Each of the Playbook’s nine chapters includes examples from the Center for Digital Thriving, HopeLab, and Character Lab of how they’ve used their own guidance in past and current work. Their chapter on designing activities, for example, details the Center for Digital Thriving’s “Open Up, Build On, Dive In, Stand Back” structure when working with the same group over multiple sessions.

The goal of that transparency is to demystify youth-engaged research by showing how those learned lessons can make for better and more impactful research. That includes documenting and reflecting on the data gathered, including youth perspectives and interpretations when making sense of the findings, and taking care to share that research with groups most impacted by the work.

Meeting Young People Where They’re At 

One resource highlighted by the Playbook includes a number of case studies from HopeLab and the Center for Digital Thriving that highlight key takeaways from their past youth-engaged research. That includes reflections on how to set up research groups, expectations for engagement in teen focus groups, and adjustments they made to their work to better fit youth norms and preferences.

Staying Flexible 

For the Center for Digital Thriving, one key takeaway was staying flexible. By embracing real-time feedback from their research subjects, for example, the team could adjust survey questions and response options to their queries to make sure the work was more reflective of young people’s lived experiences.

This “insider knowledge” provided by youth feedback offered important context and nuance that eventually impacted the research itself: The team was able to explore entirely new lines of work that led to a recent report on teen burnout culture.