Meaningfully involving young people in research powerfully improves projects and services.1 An approach where people impacted by an issue are involved in researching it.Participatory research allows young people to study a community issue and advocate for change based on their findings.2
Research with young people could be for program development or evaluation, or it could be to form an evidence base for submissions and reports. There are many benefits, methods and considerations — this resource is a general introduction.
Participatory Action Research (PAR) is a reflective, problem-solving research process that allows young people directly affected by an issue to become co-researchers to study it, then advocate for change based on their findings.3
PAR helps young people engage with their community by:
- Defining community issues and building knowledge about community needs1,
- Forming their own opinions about the causes and effects of the issues, and
- Working together with other young people and adults to respond to issues.
Other benefits of PAR are:
- Increased diversity - when young people interview their friends (and friends of friends) it broadens the groups of young people involved.
- Skills building – young researchers develop literacy, communication, and strategic thinking skills.2
- Networking – young researchers build contacts that can help access to career and leadership networks.
- Peer leadership - young people can be inspired to take action themselves when they see their friends researching and advocating for change.4
Check out Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) youth-adult participatory research project with a group of students enrolled in an alternative school. Read their co-authored report or watch the short documentary, or you can watch a short documentary video about the project here.
A researcher from Victoria University speaking to two young Peer Workers in disaster recovery. They are sitting in a meeting space, at a table with lots of papers and various fidget toys.
There are a few ways to run participatory research, and the level of young people’s involvement can vary based on what you’re trying to achieve. Young people could:
- be participants
- contribute to the design and direction of the research (then others carrying out the research)
- design and carry out the research in partnership with others
- design and carry out the research themselves (sometimes called ‘peer research’ or ‘participatory action research’).5
Any piece of research with young people needs to prioritise their wellbeing and consider the ethics around their involvement.
Is there any risk of harm for those involved? Can young people give informed consent to take part? How will privacy and confidentiality be addressed?
Informed consent
Research participants should be clearly informed on the research project subject matter, how their information will be used, what will be expected of them (including time commitments and Payment for a professional service or contribution.remuneration), and how their information will be used.3
They can't give informed consent if they don’t have all the information!
Participants should also be informed about their right to discontinue engagement with the project at any time, and how their information will be used in this instance.
University and internal organisation research
The ethics process for conducting research with children and young people in universities is there to make sure that the research is conducted in an ethical and responsible manner, and all the risks have been accounted for.
While every institution will have their own policies, here’s an overview of the process.
- Check ethics guidelines. One of the first steps in designing your research project will be checking your institution’s ethics process to ensure you have everything you need. It’s important to be on top of this to make sure you don’t have to make any major changes to your project due to ethical concerns.
- Do a risk assessment. Researchers should conduct a thorough risk assessment to identify any potential risks or harms to children and young people participating in the research. This includes physical, psychological, social, and legal risks. A risk assessment shows you have considered all the possible risks and have in place strategies to prevent or minimise the chance of harm to young people involved.5
- Get informed consent. Researchers must obtain informed consent from both the children and young people participating in the research and their parents or legal guardians if relevant.
Informed consent involves providing participants and their guardians with comprehensive information about the research, including its purpose, procedures, risks, benefits, and their rights as participants.5 - Get ethics committee approval. Researchers may need to submit their research proposal to a registered Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC). This committee is responsible for assessing the ethical implications of the research and ensuring that it meets relevant guidelines and regulations.
- Ensure privacy and confidentiality. Researchers must take steps to protect the privacy and confidentiality of children and young people involved in research. This might include using pseudonyms, securely storing data, and ensuring limited numbers of people have access to participants’ personal information.5
- Follow the feedback loop. Researchers should consider ways to receive feedback from young people, including reflections from their experience and discussions around the research findings. It’s also important to update young people on how the research is being shared, and provide them with the final report for transparency.1
- Regularly carry out monitoring and reporting. Throughout the research process, researchers are responsible for monitoring the well-being of participants and reporting any concerns to the ethics committee. Researchers should also follow up with participants once the project has been completed, to provide support if needed.1
Even once you have ethics approval for your research project, it’s important to follow these guidelines to ensure the continued safety and respect of the young people who are contributing to your project.5
Human Research Ethics Committees
The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) in Australia provides ethical guidelines for research involving children and young people. This informs the decisions of Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs) who review research proposals involving people to make sure they’re following ethical guidelines.
There are over 200 HRECs registered in Australia. If you don’t have a HREC registered to your institution, you can contact any HREC from the NHMRC’s registration list to review your ethics application.
Let the Child Safe Officers or support person at your work know when the workshop is happening and discuss whether you think someone is needed to attend or be on-call.
Only ask questions you need to ask in the A form of application (abbreviated as EOI).expression of interest[/tooltip] – you not want to encourage people to disclose abuse in a form as this could prompt a duty of care situation. Asking a question like ‘why would you like to contribute to this discussion’ is an open way for people to talk about lived experience without them needing to share their full story.
Do a pre-brief call with each attendee – talking to them about what to expect and some of the questions that will be asked so they can prepare and you can both (together) ensure they are in the right place to contribute safely.
Book a support worker for the session. You might have one at your organisation; if they aren’t available, you can book a social worker through an agency such as Tradewinds.
Share a full agenda for the session with participants in advance of the workshop – ideally 5-7 days ahead. Include listed support services.
Use/create group agreements at the start of the workshop so that there’s a shared understanding of what to expect from each other – this gives licence for the facilitators to jump in if someone is making a The process of making facts or information known.disclosure or taking the conversation down a path that may be triggering for other participants.
A brief note about content that may be disturbing or upsetting for some people. Trigger warnings are given ahead of time.Content/trigger warnings – include this within the group agreements and explain how they will work in the session.
Have the support worker introduce themselves and even run a quick centring (or brain break) activity at the start or middle of the session. Explain clearly how they can be contacted during the session and after if this is appropriate.
List support services at the start of the session. This could include your EAP stands for Employee Assistance Program. This is a free and confidential counselling service a workplace provides for their employees.EAP if this is appropriate. These should be provided both verbally and in writing.
Run a check out at the end of the session – for example, ‘what is one word to describe how you’re feeling?’ This can highlight anyone who might need follow-up.
Allow time at the end of the session for people to ask questions before you leave or log off. For example, when you’re clearing up the room in-person, or staying on the Zoom call for anyone who wants to debrief.
Debrief with the facilitators at the end of the session, and include a question on child safety and participant wellbeing. Ask if anyone is concerned about a participant that should be followed up. Contact a child safe officer if there are any disclosures or concerns about abuse.
Follow up with participants within 2 days – make a quick phone call to see how they’re travelling and remind them how to access additional support if they need it. This is an opportunity to also ask if they had any follow up thoughts or anything they didn’t get a chance to share.
A group of young people gathered around an iPad in a university library, laughing and chatting.
In any research involving young people, there can be different levels of power at play. This can affect how young people participate in both the research and the findings.
Be aware of the power adults have when working with young people, and how the location of research can impact this.6
For example, if young people are researching within their school, they may have to negotiate with teachers and principals which could limit their autonomy in the research process. This is an opportunity for adults involved in the project to step in and advocate on behalf of the young researchers.
If you’re working with young researchers, you’ll need to strike a balance between supporting them and managing them. Be honest about what the research can achieve and be transparent throughout the process and any resulting decisions.4
- Have clear expectations –develop clear aims and objectives and goals. Know how much commitment is required and work to a timeline.7
- Develop skills and interests – offer young people training in research skills and make use of creative media and activities like music, video, photography, art or drama.
- Celebrate and spread the results – let people know what you’ve found out by writing a report and launching it at a special event.
- Help young people understand how their research relates to their lives and their communities - use this knowledge to maintain interest and energy.
- Help young people make research decisions by offering structure and providing guidance (young researchers don’t have to do everything themselves!)5
Ally
Thank you so much. Welcome. Yes, first I would also just like to acknowledge country particularly the lands that I'm on now of the Boonwurrung, Woi Wurrung and Wathaurong people of the Kulin nation and just acknowledge our academic indigenous unit at VU headed by Karen Jackson and, and her guidance. And I guess just pay tribute to the deep knowledge is that that have been here, like Sam said for 10s of 1000s of years.
So just to get started, can everyone see my good to go? Lovely.
Alright, so I am Ali Baker, I'm at VCU and the youth and community studies area and I go by she her pronouns. And today I'm just presenting with two young people who were in the we hear Youth Project who have gone on to create their own youth led organisation, activate youth voice, so that's really exciting. I'm going to try and speed through so apologies if you feel like it's a bit of a tornado, but um, we have a pre recorded presentation from Billy and AJ is going to talk about the projects that happened after this. So you can email me if you want more info, anything like that. So I'll just get moving.
So this just we're just presenting on behalf of a broader collective. So just to acknowledge all the different members that we had, in this project, it was funded by the Department of Health. And it was in the Loddon Mallee area aiming to train young people to become at first it was more around peer interviewing. And then the focus was more on all aspects of of research, just acknowledging that if you don't have the full sort of range of research skills, there's often ways that voice and participation can sort of be co opted and control. So that was one of the main things that sat underneath this project. So Doran harbour health was the commissioning and sort of lead organisation on it. And we worked with ya lab and Vu to deliver the training.
Just a bit of background, this project is part of a whole series of of research action research projects that we've done over the last couple of years, as it seemed like there was a lot more need to do this kind of work sort of, you know, in in a time of crisis, but just to kind of highlight how interconnected they are in that first project that we had in 2020, the pandemic hit when we were in the midst of trying to create sort of a local knowledge base by interviewing young people, youth workers, and serving young people about not only the issues that they felt were most relevant for them, those aged 16 to 25, I should have clarified, but the ways in which I suppose they had participated in different programmes and within institutions, just to get a gauge of what was happening, and to use that or to hope to use that to inform other initiatives and that sort of thing. So we, we are actually launching that report. Now, if you believe it two years later, it's over 100 pages. So you may not end up reading it all. But you can always extract out bits that you like, and we'll send that around Sam if we're allowed to. But everything that we did in that project, I feel like has resonated throughout all the projects that followed on from it. It was like just the reverberations of what young people were saying we use that directly to inform how we approached and framed other projects. So I just wanted to kind of acknowledge that. Yeah, a lot of the framework and sort of curriculum that we go over today, is really informed by that.
So these were some of the key considerations and I won't read them all. But it was really just about the need to reconnect and build a sense of community or some of the really important things obviously, prioritising wellbeing and mental health is something that we have seen, but particularly in social justice work and institutions, it's often still focus on outputs, productivity, and as one young person said, not being able to bring their whole selves to those kinds of projects. So I think the other one that I would like to flag is do Just five and six around, looking at the different ways in which participation can be compromised. But in particular, now the government's focus on voice and CO design co option, I think a lot of times we're finding ourselves in an advocacy sort of activist position where we have to argue for why it shouldn't just be an extracted process, why it should be allowing power to move, and we should have these more horizontal leadership approaches with young people and embedded into institutions.
I think that was one of the really kind of strong things that came out of that report, which is really relevant to all of us, obviously. So just to sorry, my cats sitting in front of my slides at the moment. So just the aims of this project were really to create a local network of youth researchers, and there was an education training sort of focus, which, yes, is happening a lot at the moment, but a good a good thing. So looking at how we can develop leadership capacities, but also thinking about participatory action research as a precursor to other education, and training, employment opportunities, and then also creating clear channels for youth voice in place based projects, particularly in rural Victoria, where some of these programmes are not, I guess, as many or as easily accessed.
Okay, so just a little tiny bit snippet. And I'm really happy to send out anything else that people want to know sort of more about the underpinnings of youth participatory action research, but it's really, it's quite similar to co design in a way except that the focus is a little bit more on this, I'm following the research process. So around developing the research question together, identifying the kinds of methods and approach you're going to use, and working in a collective to really, I guess, kind of ensure that you've got a multitude of perspectives. And also, I guess, tapping into some of those other recommendations around mentorship and relationship building, those are some of the key things. And I guess, in contrast to a lot of research, it's really looking to create change at multiple levels. So just some of the selected values and commitments.
And this is from Maria Torah in the US, she has a really good framework for youth participatory research as sort of more of a political project. So places value on lived experience of historically marginalised communities. knowledge production is not objective or value free. So it's, it is a political task, particularly when you have young people who have not been deemed the the experts or the knowledge holders in a lot of settings, attends to issue of issues of power and vulnerability throughout the research with who you're researching, but also within the collective, a focus on relationships, and then obviously, that multiple layers and levels of action and change. So the approach that we devised was one that we really thought about in terms of what we'd learned from the other projects. And also those those frameworks that have been put forth by other people doing wiper.
So it was around having a living curriculum, which is really just acknowledging the ways in which we have sort of intersectional knowledge that can inform, you know, the issues that are important, how we see them, how we might look at them, and one that's constantly evolving. So something that we tried to have that AJ and I were talking about yesterday is like, have a structure, but make sure that structure is flexible, it's bendable, it's movable, it's constantly evolving, based on people's interests based on the ways that they learn. And so you'll see, we tried to tackle that with how we deliver the project as well, the different kinds of learning resources and that sort of thing.
And two, we really had a strong focus on power and critical questioning, because we thought, you know, it's one thing to learn the skills, but once you get in there, you being there, and having a say, is probably going to be an issue. So we tried to have that focus on, you know, questioning why, you know, they might be questioned. And then here's sort of the lots of text models. So we were looking at all these different elements, which was kind of part of the brief that we were given by Thorne harbour, but we've kind of shifted it to fit what why lab and ourselves add so why lab really focused on the leadership and training and the CO design and systems change. And we worked on a lot of the other elements, but we also had Lauren harbours expertise in creating safe spaces and Yeah, so it was a very juicy as Chris Fong would say collaboration.
And on top of that we were we were looking to research this model. So we obviously collected data with the young people who participated. And so the curriculum involved, well, what would have been all in person sessions, but ended up not being we went into one of those snaps in March, was it I think 2021. And it was a very day will probably tell you a condensed programme. We did all of this in about six months, which seems short, but it was quite intense. Because we did the training at the same time that we did the brief, which is the practical learning component, which was researching an issue from campus be Shire, which belly we'll talk all about. So we had our in person and online sessions, again, shifting and changing those to what would work. So we did have some more one on one or drop in sessions, we created this crazy, huge workbook that has all different bits of information, resources, links, everything you could want. We have some cheat sheets and resource toolkits, as well. And then we made some short videos.
This is just another look at all the different bits, we did some place based sort of Photovoice type mapping at the start to look at community assets and connections to place as it was a place based project. So it was really important to get that grounded knowledge given that the research team was not from the local area. So these are just some of the little bits that we did. And then this is sort of the timeline in another way. So we had originally it was supposed to be young people 12 to 25. But we had a few of the younger ones drop off which we thought would happen potentially because it is really difficult to cater to such a wide age range. When you're we're doing research training. So that was an important learning. So sick stayed on of the the 11 that initially started we had five shires represented, we delivered about 10 workshops, drop in sessions and face to face meetings. And these were basically just the topics for each of the sessions. And again, in the sessions, we also did the practice some of the practical work. So developing the research questions as we went along. I might just see how this goes. This is Billy.
Billie
Morning everybody. My name is Billie Taylor and I was part of the way youth project team and I'm also involved in the activate youth voice group. Thank you so much for coming along to our presentation. I look forward to sharing with you a bit about our training program and our first project with the capacity Shire. This project was collaborated by Thorne harbour country in collaboration with David Paige to develop the way he youth program which broadly aimed to build capacity of young people between the ages of 12 to 25. Particularly in Pew Research and interviewing, teamwork, leadership and research in general. The program draws on the youth participatory action research, which positions young people as co researchers, utilising a unique skills and experiences as young people where we can work together with other researchers and organisations to develop and shape research projects that are youth informed and youth led that work on manners are important to us.
This project was a fully subsidised course, which is fantastic because it's designed to develop the knowledge and skills of young people in the area. So we can form a network of youth peer interviewers in the region. This is one of the big aims of activate youth voice group, as we are really looking to expand in the future, particularly when we hear youth program hopefully has more participants in the next couple of years and then we can grow our project. We've already added some more young people into our one of our latest projects, which was absolutely fantastic. And it was great to see our young people be as inspired by research and youth change as us. They got some training on interviewing and research and they were able to conduct fantastic interviews, which was great. As a network of youth peer interviewers will be able to work with organisations in the future to develop youth led change from our diverse experiences as young people this project collaborated with don't have a country Victoria University and while up, all these organisations worked so well together and it was fantastic to get training from different points of view. And you had that really diverse range of understanding about our projects and about research in general.
We had very different trainings to make sure organisation for instance, y lab was more kind of teamwork based leadership, and we've got to learn a lot of us and about people that we're going to be working with, which was absolutely fantastic. And I can see the way it affects how we're working together now, which is amazing. Victoria University worked more on our researching skills or interviewing skills, more about the brief and it's just yeah, absolutely fundamental to our skills in the process of developing our data collection tools, and organising. Sorry, so we here youth training program involves a mix of face to face and online sessions. In total, there were 10 sessions delivered with true face to face eight online COVID impacted a lot of our global sessions, we add additional face to face session and preparation data collection data tutor, which was fantastic to get some more responses we had are a key part of the opportunity for the research project was to conduct as a project in response to a break from a local government organisation.
We're not getting on your own agencies in the project, because you have an ultimate goal was to create this network of young people who were working for organisations. And this was a great first relationship to make, we can actually share. The practical task with a training program was provided by the combat fisheye Council, which was in response to their vision for the future. And we looked at some of the information they had from young people and tried to find, I guess, a gap had find a community of voices who weren't being heard very well. And we looked at their vision and what they guess what they saw for the town, and realised there were some voices weren't being heard. And that kind of that developed, outbreak that develops out research in the future, which was fantastic. Throughout the process of data collection, in our project, we decided to broaden the focus outside of just combat speech and abroad London Valley region, coming across some barriers in game two. So that's to respond to our surveys and getting some more interviews happening, you realise that they'd be very, very many similar experiences throughout Loddon Valley region. And we thought, why not broaden that and broaden the voices that we hear in our project, which was fantastic. And throughout our training program, we were introduced to many humanly based approaches to interviewing and research, which was fantastic. We learnt about so many different research styles. And that informed the ones that we used a picture which were many surveys in interviewing, which was fantastic. Yeah, during the sessions, when also in the workbook content, which we had this fantastic workbook of information that we could reflect back onto, and a lot of that was about research. And we learned about many of the, I guess, youth friendly approaches to research and how we can make the experience more comfortable for young people. Our data collection tools were co designed by us, alongside the Victorian university researchers, we provided a really great hands on opportunity to be involved in research, like we were doing everything from the interviews to the coding of the interviews, and finding the themes and the interviews to creating presentations like this, which was fantastic. We use thematic analysis as a method to analyse the qualitative data collected through interviews and surveys, which was a really great tool. And I think we all became very, very passionate about qualitative research.
So a little bit about our research projects, process, sorry, as I spoke about before, so as I mentioned, we took some time unpacking the brief. I'm about to speak to Jess from convexity, Shire, a little bit about the vision for capacity and a bit about young people in the area and some of the challenges that she thinks they face in the community. We then narrow that focus, we looked at the picture that we had in the brief, and tried to find, I guess some of the concerns that we thought we saw in the information we provided and potentially some gaps and things that we aren't hearing enough about. We decided that we would focus on retention. What if what makes people stay? What makes people leave? What does this town need to create a space and we've got that are are engaged with and how can we have a community where young people. We'll see value in sticking around. We then co designed on research methods, we decided to go for a survey and a semi structured interview and learned a lot about those research methods on the way. We then gathered survey interviewing data, which was absolutely fantastic.
We had 11 interviews and 29 survey responses. This process was absolutely fantastic. I love to conducting interviews, and learning more about myself and how I how I approach interviewing young people was absolutely fantastic. And the data analysis stage that was a big stage. As you know, we we learned a lot of that stage. And we had help from the train university researchers, which was fantastic. It was great to have be hands on in that process, and really understand what we're doing. We learned a lot about coding and learn about finding your themes from those codes that we were creating. And we Yeah, it was just fantastic to see the data that we're collecting.
And then finally, we'll present you and the data to others, which is where we're at today, which is fantastic. And some of the things we found throughout our interviews and L and our surveys are absolutely fantastic to learn about the some of the issues that are most important young people in the town, in the capacity show and the broader Valley region. People talked about transport, mental health, discrimination and inclusion, exclusion sorry, drugs and alcohol, and resources and regional towns. We had some fantastic quotes young people in the introduce, and fantastic responses that led I guess, led presentations like this, and hopefully, hopefully will lead other vision future and other policies that can possibly may use some of the top responses, massive responses about issues that impact young people. So learn how to what about mental health, combat to be shy sounding like a place that may not have enough resources to get people in their opinion and limit be had from financial insecurity, lack of employment opportunities, drugs and alcohol leads to do and harming housing and homelessness concerns.
There was a very broad spectrum of concerns we heard from young people, but one of the main ones was mental health, which was Yeah, I guess for me not not a huge surprise as people becoming more and more aware of what's mental health. And I, you know, very fortunate to say that headspace to trigger is opening, which is fantastic. And hopefully we start to guess, less of these responses in the future. Hopefully, there are, there are more services than to connect to you, which is fantastic. And we had many, many other issues mentioned. And then we broke it down some of our themes. So we talked about belonging a lot. And this was one of the reasons I guess we saw why people might want to stay in their town, you know, they feel a sense of belonging to the country and to their family and their people that we also saw young people wanting to get out of the culture of country towns, you know, finding that made perhaps somewhere in the city, they can belong, the better to a more diverse group of people. And we have young people who like them. There are a lot of a lot of different things. This analysis, which is absolutely fantastic. You can see that spectrum of responses, which was amazing.
Let's look at education or employment opportunities. This was another huge theme as to why people might stay or leave. We saw that unfortunately, smaller towns and small communities they will might have had to leave for education or employment opportunities. This was a big part of I guess I was trying to belong because some people find young people expressed that they would like to stay whoever they had to leave for the job or for higher employment.
This was absolutely a fantastic research project. And we learned so much about young people and our communities and what's important to them. And after all this we learned a lot about the value of p research a lot about guess the importance of being interviewed by someone that is that you're comfortable with looks like you talk like you and yeah, I just I really loved learning about how to make a really comfortable space for young people. And I think a lot of our interviewers really really liked the experience which is fantastic to hear. means that it was a more comfortable experience and more relatable experience. And that was really, really great feedback to have. And, you know, it meant that it was a meaningful use engagement experience and meant that youth believing his project and hearing from our young people, you know, it was a very youth led research project, which is absolutely fantastic.
And, finally, it meant that we were able to develop activate youth voice group. After this training, a few of the participants of the Waheed youth program decided, why not continue doing this, you know, why not continue visiting the organisations and local councils and informing informing policies being consultants for their research. After all of this training, you know, it'd be great to continue doing this research. So we are a group of young people from rural and regional Victoria, with a diverse range of lived experiences and expertise. We're very passionate about the need for representation, and compensation for young people aged 25. And we aim to increase engagement of young people within their community and society at large. This includes, you know, policy, forming policy, being involved in youth led research. And everything in between. We're very open to many different and engagement projects, which is very exciting. We provide intermediary body of one or more consultants, organisations and councils. And hopefully, we can broaden our horizons for that. And Alex will go into that Morphew better.
That's it for me. Thank you so much for listening, I really hope you've learned a bit about us and a bit about our projects.
AJ
Awesome, thanks. Sweet. So I'm gonna jump on that and just really zoom through who activate youth voices. So I do have QR codes on the screen. But I'm also going to just shoot through what those QR codes are in the chat as they come up. So this is just our little website that we've made, we are still working progress on the website. But yes, as Bailey said, we're an intermediary group made up of young people, though about four of us who are regularly working in the organisation. And we, we have a few the connections to other young people in the area like we use now. Last foot jacked, which Next slide, please. So Oh, good. So we did, we last did finish the youth takeover with the Loddon Campapse LLEN. And we are currently on pathways to pride with Thorne Harbour country. Next slide, please.
So the how we lost projects, how work works was a project that was facilitated by Jeanette Pope in conjunction with the cleanse in the campus in the lung capacity area. And the logic came about in response to the state government's further report, which outlines their findings in relation to VCAL and VCE because they're planning on murder, the state government is planning on merging those two arm education paths into a cohort again, and are looking for support and suggestions and how to make it as smooth as possible. So with Jeanette, we interviewed, we focused on getting young women into trade. And so that we interviewed I want to say 15 interviews, but there was some of them had, like 30 people, some of them had four people, some of them were kind of more like focus groups. After that, the interview notes were compiled and then compiled into the report, which I've just sent through. And we recently had the launch of that from there. We went on and helped with the social media campaign, and that's one of the photos there was from the campaign. Awesome.
Our next step is our current project, which this isn't the this is just a such a rainbow path on Google. But um, that's actually li in Sydney, I'm pretty sure. But most of the links to this first one I'm going to do is there's a survey which if you think if you're in the area and interested to pass through and a expression of interest form. Um, so this project is currently happening in the London area, so I can pass the central goldfields sea of Greater Bendigo lord and master majors, and mount Alexander Shire. We are wanting to hear from young LGBTQIA plus people about their experiences with accessing safe and inclusive health care. So we're trying to find what barriers there may be in accessing that in the rural areas that, as I mentioned, that is currently a work in progress. And we are still accepting expressions of interest for interviews and the survey responses. Yeah. And now, I will open up to the floor, if anyone has any questions.
Sam
Yeah. Amazing, thanks so much, AJ, and to Ali and to Billy as well. I'm just filling in time, so people can get their thoughts together around questions. So if you have a question to ask, please put your hand up, maybe use the reactions and raise hand and I can throw to you. But it's incredible to learn more about youth participatory action research. That wasn't something that I knew a whole lot about, to be honest. And so that in and of itself was incredibly educational. And to hear about the actual experiences you had as well, I'm interested AJ, did you know much about any of these topics? Things like codesign?
AJ
Absolutely not. So my extent before joining this project, was I volunteered my time at two local youth groups in the Muslim ages. And then through one of them, they were like, hey, someone's doing this. You should, you should go do it. And I'm like, okay, cool. And then I did it. And now I'm much more confident. And I understand a lot more. And I used to hate interviews, especially as being interviewed because I was very uncomfortable doing it, because I'm like, Ah, but now I'm pretty chill with it. And now I love that I now understand how to make, especially those environments more inviting, and safe.
Sam
Yeah, yeah. Great. Thanks, AJ. I'll throw to Maddy with their hand up.
Maddy
Maddy speaking, thanks for the awesome presentation. My question is for you, AJ, and it's how did you go from being a part of this participatory project, just starting your own organisation? Was that little journey like?
AJ
Um so, quite quickly, surprisingly, like thinking back at it. It was a the group of us really loved this project. And we had backgrounds in just community work, some of like Billy works with, I'm pretty sure it's headspace. And then I've just been in the community. So we've all we've had that community focus ourselves, and we went, Hey, we should do this. So we got together, we had a quick discussion and then went to ally and Kate, who was part of Thorne Harbour, and was like, hey, we want to do this because we see that there's a little bit of a gap in the industry of, there's a lot of youth consultancy, but not a lot of youth led youth consultancy. So like not a lot of peer stuff. So then through them, we were like, hey, what do we need to do? How do we do this? We're currently in the middle of trying to find an auspice at the moment because that's what we've decided is the best way to go. So we're in the little medium ground at the moment where we're using our own ABNs for projects, but hopefully within the coming month or two, we'll find an auspice. But yeah, there's a lot of there's a lot of things that like, we have the idea of, yes, let's do it. And then when we found like every little dot point, like on our, on our website we've had, we have we have client info, we have the information pamphlet, we have our code of ethics and our code of conduct and our charter which we had to write, which was very, very nice to just put our heads together and go, write what you think should be in here and then we all go over it ,and go yes no like merge ideas. Yet there's a lot of things and it's been it's been a challenge. But we're here. We are still establishing but we are keen.
Sam
Thanks so much AJ and thanks to Ali. I'm gonna stop the recording there.
Providing an opportunity for feedback is important when conducting research that involves young people and is best practice youth participation. Read more about asking young people for feedback:
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For more on ethical work with young people, read YACVic's Code of Ethical Practice.
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The Australian Institute of Family Studies provides practical support for using a PAR framework with young people.
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The Department of Social Services (DSS) has a comprehensive best practice guide to PAR.
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The Young and Resilient research Centre has developed a toolkit that supports young people to take on co-researcher roles.
- Ozer, E. J., Abraczinskas, M., Duarte, C., Mathur, R., Ballard, P. J., Gibbs, L., Olivas, E. T., Bewa, M. J., & Afifi, R. (2020). Youth Participatory Approaches and Health Equity: Conceptualization and Integrative Review. American Journal of Community Psychology, 66(3-4), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12451
- Berg Powers, C. and Allaman, E. (2012). How Participatory Action Research Can Promote Social Change and Help Youth Development, Born This Way Foundation and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
- Halliday, A. J., Kern, M. L., Garrett, D. K., & Turnbull, D. A. (2018). The student voice in well-being: a case study of participatory action research in positive education. Educational Action Research, 27(2). 173–196.
- Kay, E., Tisdall, M., Davis, J., and Gallagher, M. (2009). Researching with Children and Young People, London: Sage.
- Geldens, P. and Randall, L. (2012). ‘Sounds like a plan: Engaging young people in research and community planning’, Research 101(a) Involving young people in research.
- Kellett, M. (2010). Rethinking Children and Research: Attitudes in Contemporary Society, London: Continuum.
- Fieldgrass, L. (2011). Mobile Matters: The Youth Advocates Project. Developing a youth participatory action research and advocacy program, Sydney: Australian Communications Consumer Action Network and Brotherhood of St Laurence.