Specific in this way of doing research is the level of decision making of the young people doing the research. This creates a high sense of ownership among the youth researchers regarding the research. In this process the young people make all the choices that have to be made in a study. We experienced that it is empowering to allow young people to formulate the research question, choose and develop the method, gather the data and analyse it. In giving them the ownership and responsibility, they came up with all different kinds of subjects to think about, that are important for the quality of the research: reliability, anonymity, ethical concerns, replicability, etc. In formal education these are topics that are part of lectures.
At the end of the process the youngsters presented their study. Each part of the presentation could have been given by any of the youth researchers. Everybody felt so involved and had been contributing to each part of the research, that they felt competent in presenting each part of the study.
We studied the impact of 6 Erasmus+ Key action 1 programmes.
Although all parties involved in these programs have a strong feeling that there is an impact on the young people and organizations who participated, no data was available to show this impact.
The research we designed had a twofold aim: gather data on the impact, and teach young people about doing research. The participatory research approach allowed both goals to be reached. All youth researchers involved in ImpACT+ were former participants in (one of) the learning activities. Interesting in this research is that both the youth researchers and the respondents to the interviews had participated in the exchange programmes. This not only contributed to a better understanding of the impact that the exchange programmes had on its participants, in addition it strengthened the learning process for both young people and organisations.
Although, critics exist on the notion of participatory research, because researchers would be biased in the choices and analyses they make, which would affect the validity and reliability of the research, it is not what we experienced. The young people that were targeted to join the research project as youth researchers were all very motivated to show a positive result. They had experienced the impact of the youth programmes themselves and were eager to demonstrate the effect of these programmes through research. It was especially their motivation for the results that made the youth researchers to be cautious and take issues of reliability and validity serious. More than any other researcher, they were aware of the value of the collected data and could easily connect the information with the realities in their organisations.
In the ImpACT+ project the research team was very successful. The research design fitted perfectly with the way the young people were used to work together during the youth exchanges. The youth researchers owned the research process: they made the decisions, both on content and on the process.
While doing that, they were supported by a senior researcher from a university of applied sciences. This senior researcher facilitated the research process by confirming that decisions made by the youth were well fitting in with general research practices. This increased the confidence of the group. Besides, the senior researcher provided just-in-time information to guide the process, for example in the case of formulating the labelling schedule, the senior researcher guided the youth in reducing the number of categories.
Importantly, the research group was not only task-focused but also process-oriented. A facilitator supported the group process. There was time and attention for forming the group, for making sure decisions were group-based, for making sure everybody was still on board and more general, for whether everybody was feeling ok. This led to great group dynamics, which helped the youth researchers to overcome the difficult moments during the research process.
If you want to do participatory youth research to study the impact of your non-formal learning activities it is important to constantly work on the commitment of the young people to the project.
You need to build a safe environment with and for the youth researchers. An environment where they can learn and develop themselves and simultaneously use the new knowledge and capabilities needed for the research project. It is also important to have a senior researcher who can support the research project. He or she offers the framework in which the research takes place and makes an effort to have a high quality study.
It is important that the youth researchers have meetings together in order to grow as a group (safe environment) and to come to common decisions in the research process like: which data collection methods do we use; which labels will we use in the data analysis. Extra challenging in the current study, was the international context (six countries were involved). In our study we therefore planned training weeks so the researchers could work together. The work that the researchers did in between these weeks, served as input for the training weeks.
This story was coordinated by Saxion University (The Netherlands) in collaboration with the ImpACT+ project partners.
Find out more about the organization at saxion.edu .
Credits:
Created with images by Annie Spratt - "Map reading" • rawpixel - "e-mail aerial afternoon tea" • Hans - "telescope by looking view" • rawpixel - "untitled image" • Efraimstochter - "detective magnifying glass viewing" • Samuel Zeller - "Ladder to sky clouds" • qimono - "idea empty paper" • FirmBee - "ux design webdesign" • Annie Spratt - "Team work, work colleagues, working together" • Duy Pham - "untitled image" • aitoff - "hiker walker rambler" • stevepb - "dart target aim" • Pexels - "adult diary journal" • Pexels - "concept man papers" • emily reider - "untitled image" • congerdesign - "chestnut horse chestnut gather chestnuts" • rawpixel - "adult group meeting"