Understanding and Facilitating Youth Voice: Integrating Community Engaged Methods with Constructivist Grounded Theory

Background and Purpose:

Conducting research about formerly-incarcerated youth is challenging, especially on the topic of youth voice. Access barriers and mistrust of authorities may be compounded by tokenization, with hostility or disinterest from adults fueling youth’s hesitancy to use their voices. We must better understand how experiences of incarceration shape the ways that youth speak out, as this knowledge can inform strategies to ensure youth have a voice in systems that affect them. This study sought to integrate multiple methods to overcome these challenges, and explore what youth voice means to formerly-incarcerated youth.

Method:

This study used constructivist grounded theory (CGT) and community-engaged methods to collect and analyze interview data with 14 formerly-incarcerated youth. Traditional, rigorous CGT practices were followed, such as simultaneous data collection and analysis, reflexive memo-ing, constant comparison of data and evolving themes, and an intensive and iterative coding process that developed increasingly abstract categories inductively from the data. Throughout this process, academic researchers worked with two formerly-incarcerated youth consultants. Consultants provided feedback over six individual consulting sessions and by email on sampling, recruitment, ethics, analysis, and dissemination.

Results:

Results produced a model of adaptive voice. In the process of working towards living a better life post-incarceration, youth encountered injustices, and became motivated to speak out to help create a better future. However, as youth saw the consequences of using their voices while incarcerated, they learned to assess their safety and level of support, and whether their voices might make a difference. In turn, youth developed and deployed adaptive strategies, which reduced risks of speaking out, and helped achieve the desired change.

The study also produced evidence that the research process itself embodied key dimensions of youth voice identified in the model. For example, participants asked targeted questions about confidentiality and data use, and sometimes declined or hesitated to share specific examples, which consultants interpreted as protective strategies. Multiple participants said they decided to participate after determining that the researcher had good intentions, and that participation would help their concerns reach a broader audience. Consultants’ feedback with academic researchers became more direct as rapport grew, such as raising concerns in later sessions about negative connotations of terminology used in the original model name (adaptive resistance). These research dynamics mirrored participants’ examples of youth voice in other settings.

Conclusion and Implications:

Results show how CGT and community engaged methods can be combined to understand nuanced, dynamic processes like youth voice. Together, these two methods enabled a balance of rigor, trustworthiness, credibility, creativity, and reflexivity to overcome research barriers, provide a rich understanding of youth voice, and guide impactful dissemination of results to broader audiences. CGT’s interpretivist underpinnings and focus on understanding meaning through action were compatible with, and strengthened by community-engaged methods. Exploring how the research process itself embodied the research topic enabled the team to more deeply observe and even participate in dynamics of youth voice, and produced findings that effectively speak to the ways that youth voice is meaningful to young people.