Photovoice with Teen Court Youth: A Restorative Justice Project

Background/Significance: Based on restorative justice principles, Teen Court is a juvenile justice diversion program for first time youth offenders that focuses on reintegrating youth into the community through prosocial sanctions. Although most Teen Court programs include community service, it is difficult to ensure the quality of community service projects and thus the extent to which projects are in line with restorative justice varies. Photovoice, a method of social change in which participants take photos of community issues in order to engage in social action, could be implemented as a restorative justice service project within Teen Court given that it engages youth in identifying, exploring, and addressing social problems. The research question guiding the focus of this qualitative study was: How can photovoice be used as a tool to plan and execute a youth-driven restorative justice project?

Methods: A restorative justice photovoice project was implemented as part of a Teen Court program in an ethnically diverse, socioeconomically disadvantaged, rural county. Participants included five adolescent girls who were referred for fighting and were given the opportunity to participate in the photovoice project to meet the requirements of their community service. The project included an orientation session followed by 6 weekly sessions in which the group decided on a weekly photo topic and shared their photos with the group. The SHOWED method was used to guide discussion, moving discussion from the concrete toward analysis and action about girls’ bullying and fighting. The photovoice project culminated with a youth-led social change project.

The weekly sessions were audio-recorded, transcribed, coded, and analyzed to identify key themes and patterns using Moustakas’ structured empirical approach to phenomenology. Content was examined to identify predetermined and emerging themes related to peer pressure, bullying, and fighting. These steps included bracketing and reduction, delineating units of meaning, clustering units to form themes, and extracting general and unique themes. Open coding was used to create nodes, followed by the analysis of nodes, which were collapsed and expanded as appropriate. Researchers used a constant comparative approach in the open coding phase to achieve saturation, reviewing all content until no new insights were uncovered.

Results: 268 significant statements were extracted and examined in order to construct their formulated meanings. The formulated meanings were condensed and arranged into clusters using nodes, resulting in the emergence of six major themes, with numerous sub-themes. The seven major themes included: acceptance and diversity, connectedness, prosocial coping skills, the value of violence, self-preservation and survival, and the power of expression. Building from these patterns of communication through the six-week dialogue, the youth participants designed and developed a social action project. The collective expression of this project incorporated variations of these themes, and was shared through a video format.

Implications: Photovoice can be a useful tool within restorative justice projects. As exemplified in this study, the photovoice method is a useful way to engage youth in identifying and analyzing relevant social problems and provides the foundation for meaningful social action projects. Future studies should replicate this process with court-involved youth.