From Telling to Showing: Using Participatory Screenwriting to Illuminate Latina Youth’s Mental Health Experiences

Background and Purpose: Arts-based research uses creative approaches to co-create knowledge and outputs, serving as a mode of inquiry, representation, and dissemination. Its participatory and expressive nature makes it well-suited for adolescents and young adults, allowing them to explore and articulate their experiences in meaningful ways. Arts-based research also generates creative outputs that engage broader audiences, including policymakers, practitioners, and communities. Among these, narrative (i.e., fictional) films are a powerful means of illustrating lived experiences and disseminating research in an accessible format. However, despite the popularity of screen-based media, narrative films are not widely used in arts-based research with youth. This flash talk examines participatory screenwriting—an innovative method that engages participants in writing a screenplay—as a tool for representation and meaning-making, yielding novel insights into youth experiences.

Methods: This flash talk draws on ethnographic evidence from a participatory screenwriting project in which five Latina young adults (ages 19-23) co-created a narrative film about their adolescent mental health experiences. The process, conducted virtually from January to May 2024, involved Zoom meetings and asynchronous collaboration via Google Docs. Data sources included meeting recordings, notes, creative outputs (plot maps, scene outlines, film treatments, annotated screenplays, character descriptions, mood boards, and the completed film), and reflexive field notes. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, we analyzed how participants engaged in meaning-making and what insights emerged about Latina youth.

Results: Participatory screenwriting enabled Latina young adults to express their experiential knowledge through fictional characters, engaging in three interrelated meaning-making activities: (1) Embodiment – translating emotions into audiovisual forms and depicting how distress manifests physically, (2) Critical Representation – creating and critiquing characters based on lived experience while negotiating harmful stereotypes, and (3) Attention to Audience – considering viewer perspectives and communicating in ways that resonate with intended audiences. These findings suggest that participatory screenwriting can offer valuable insights into adolescent and young adult development.

Conclusions and Implications: This study highlights the potential of participatory screenwriting to deepen our understanding of diverse youth populations by engaging them in meaning-making processes that illuminate their lived experiences. Centering participants' voices in fictional narratives fosters critical consciousness and self-reflection while generating creative outputs that can challenge dominant narratives about youth mental health. Additionally, narrative films offer a compelling medium for knowledge translation, with implications for clinicians, educators, and policymakers seeking to engage young people and families in meaningful conversations about mental health. Social work scholars and practitioners can adopt and adapt participatory screenwriting as a flexible, arts-based method to explore the lived experiences of other groups and generate creative outputs with real-world impact.