Deeply Participatory Research and Practice with Urban Youth Experiencing Marginalizations Based on Income and Race: Ontological and Epistemological Considerations

Background and Purpose

Community Based Participatory Action Research (CBPAR) is increasingly recognized as a valuable approach to research with youth experiencing marginalization on the basis of race and income (McCrea et al., 2024; Ozer, 2017). Because CBPAR includes youths’ voices in intervention design, implementation, and evaluation, it may serve a translational science function, offering an antidote to the lack of “voltage” characterizing some traditional research methods (Al-Ubaydli, List, & Suskind, 2017) “about” persons in high-burden communities. However, there are many ways to go about CBPAR and setting up relationships between researchers and youth, and the impact of those relationships on both knowledge and youth outcomes has been insufficiently studied. This paper responds to that need.

Methods

This presentation uses examples to demonstrate that research relationships with youth are distinctive ontologies with their own epistemologies. The research described here occurred in the context of a high dosage (80+ sessions), thoroughly participatory after school program intervention and program evaluation with youth. The process of designing, gathering and analyzing the 212 peer-to-peer program evaluations will be discussed, with findings for understanding researcher-youth relationships.

Results

In this program, the high dosage and intensity of focus on youth voices created relationships between instructors and youth that catalyzed the youths’ critique and frankness about destructive social stereotypes, research procedures, and scientific knowledge “about” them. Youth rejected standardized scales for program evaluation as “not about us” or invalid. They insisted they did not need interventions to prevent violence perpetration but rather support in shifting racist societal and scientific narratives, developing human capital and academic abilities, and empowerment to contribute remedies to community problems. Youth also persistently expressed their hoped-for futures for themselves and their communities. Further, youth engagement in programming skyrocketed from the typical 50% to 93% or better, with youth descriptions of the meaning of the program growing in profundity as well.

Conclusions and Implications

As youth co-designed curricula and program evaluations were implemented, findings deviated from research norms which by contrast appear tainted by scientific racism (Saini, 2019). Findings problematize the ecological validity of research methods that set up researcher-youth relationships with relatively short and superficial duration. The deep involvement of youth with instructors and as co-researchers combined with the participatory epistemologies reveal the value of ontologically distinctive, committed researcher-youth relationships engaging youth as full partners in intervention design, research problem formulation, design of methods, data analysis, and presentation of findings. Youth’s cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) was consistently illuminated in every stage of the process, ranging from evidence for their resistance against oppressions to commitment to their building and sustaining social capital for themselves and community members (McCrea et al., 2024). Findings suggest that high-dosage interventions with thorough-going participatory involvement of youth in research can yield valuable new insights for anti-racist social work science and support overcoming implementation problems plaguing contemporary social and behavioral research.