Mobilizing Youth, Partnering with Our Boys: Our Curriculum on Training Youth at-Risk Community-Based Participatory Research

Background/purpose:When focusing on promoting health equity in low-income communities, youth engagement offers a nuanced perspective closely reflecting the targeted study population. Through this project, we outline the “Our Boys” youth-led CBPR plan, a 17-week curriculum and related task to investigate and intervene on preventable factors contributing to racial disparities in asthma among youth. Our findings demonstrate that training “Our Boys” helped connect researchers to the targeted population and assisted researchers to better understand the contextual barriers that place children and youth at risk of developing or exacerbating the symptoms of asthma.

Methods:We engaged six African American male youth aged 16 to 18 years in a 17-week community-based participatory research training. The youth identified the knowledge gaps among their peers of the causes and consequences of asthma. Classes were split into two, two-hour sessions. In session one,   students learned the elements of research with a focus on ethics, formative data collection, sampling measurement, and analyzing, interpreting, and presenting data. In the second session, students implemented research methods through modeling their instructors and investigating the causes of consequences of asthma. Facilitated by two graduate level researchers, students also completed tasks related to the research content presented and demonstrated their ability to learn and synthesize new information using a grounded theory approach.

Results:Once certified to conduct human subject research, “Our Boys” conducted interviews with community members and students, as well as reviewed the literature to understand better the contextual factors that made asthma outcomes worse for children and youth that lived in Homewood. These youth noted that there was a striking lack of awareness among their peers on the causes and consequences of asthma. Identifying this need, these youth set out to create and frame a culturally-specific intervention to raise awareness of asthma, asthma care and related treatment. The final intervention was a short film along with a pre- and post-assessment to measure awareness of asthma causes, correlates and comorbidities among peers in their high school. 

Conclusion/Implications: These youth demonstrated the capacity to develop high quality research and a culturally relevant intervention on an important health issue affecting their community. They presented their findings at the Homewood Children’s Village annual dinner and shared them with the community through a meeting at the local library. These youth addressed a need for intervention through a peer-to-peer approach while bringing to light a more nuanced perspective of knowledge gaps in asthma care and treatment. This research documents the valuable contribution youth can make in community-based participatory research to ensure contextualized and culturally-specific interventions.