Toward a Deeper Understanding: Valuing Youth Co-Researchers in the Research Process

Background: This roundtable focuses on the critical contributions of "youth expert" teen co-researchers (YEs) in a collaborative research process, based on the presenters' experiences with a youth-focused participatory research project. Roundtable presenters and co-authors include faculty and graduate student research team members, alongside community-based YEs.

The broader youth-focused participatory research project focused on building understanding around AAPI teens' perceptions of and experiences with youth civic engagement. Recognizing the importance of youth voice in understanding and addressing civic experiences, 10 AAPI teens were recruited to join the research team as YEs, through a partnership with six community organizations in one of the largest U.S. metropolitan regions.

While the overall design and research questions were established prior to YEs joining the project, YEs actively participated in subsequent study procedures. They worked closely and collaboratively with the university team, providing critical context for appropriately representing youth's perspectives in the research. After a youth-focused human subjects training, YEs co-developed the focus group protocol, designed and implemented peer recruitment strategies, facilitated focus groups, participated in initial data coding and provided feedback on subsequent analytic stages, translated findings into actionable data-grounded recommendations, and designed and implemented community dissemination strategies designed for impact.

Roundtable Content: Both university team members and YEs will share their experiences with teen co-researcher involvement in the research process. University team members – including former AAPI teens – will discuss the deep value of YE involvement in this project. We will discuss how YE engagement helped challenge our perspectives and realize study limitations, deepened our understandings, and brought authenticity into study findings. This includes both general observations and specific examples of how meaningfully and substantially involving YEs shaped how we analyzed and made meaning from the data and how we are disseminating findings. For example, we will discuss how university team members adjusted preliminary analyses according to YE's language and lived experiences, realizing the importance of reframing elements in ways that more accurately reflected YE's experiences.

YEs will share their project experiences and reflections on their roles and contributions. They will share how they created environments for their peers to engage in comfortable and honest discussions through the focus groups, and how they experienced facilitating these discussions. They will reflect on how they contextualized their peers' experiences, directly influencing the data analysis process through insight into concerns prevalent within their age group and their lived experiences as Asian teenagers seeking to navigate civic engagement.

Implications: Active co-researcher engagement throughout the research process can break through constraints of more traditional research methods, where academic teams function as "experts," with some distance from the lived experiences of the communities under study. Instead, in this study, teen YE participation enabled a more whole and community-grounded interpretation of the data to emerge, leading to more impactful findings and implications.

After university team members and YEs share their perspectives, we will facilitate a roundtable discussion about meaningfully engaging teen co-researchers in community-based research and strategies to navigate both the challenges and opportunities that can emerge in this process.