Hi! Our names are Brianna, Serrah, and Diamond and we are youth researchers in Minnesota. Alyssa Scott is a researcher at Child Trends supporting us in writing this blog and sharing what we think works for keeping youth engaged in research projects. The project we’re working on is Adapted Measures of Math Engagement (AM-ME), a three-year research project. Our goals are to understand Black and Latina/o students’ engagement in math and create a survey that captures Black and Latina/o students’ experiences.
Sustaining youth researcher engagement is a challenge in long-term projects. While we don’t have any magic answers to keeping youth engaged in research, here are five hot tips from our experience that make us want to continue showing up.
Hot Tips
1. Compensate youth for their expertise. We are paid a consultant rate that is equal to the rate adult consultants on the project are paid. This is important to us because it shows that we are recognized for our expertise in the same way that adult consultants are recognized.
2. Make it easy for youth to show up. When meetings are scheduled, we are asked about what days and times work for us, and we often meet right after school. There are also always snacks or meals at in-person meetings. This all makes it easier for us to attend and actively participate.
3. Build time into your meetings to support relationship building. “Team Building” activities occur at the start of every meeting and we typically dedicate 15 to 20 minutes to them. Some favorite activities of ours include cookie decorating and a game in small groups where we changed three things on our physical person(s) trying to stump the other groups about what was changed.
4. Remind youth researchers that the work they do is going to have an impact. We all agree that part of why we continue to show up and be involved in this project is because we know it might help Black and Latina/o youth in the future. The work and the results don’t need to be glamorous for youth to be interested and feel like it’s meaningful.
5. Provide opportunities for youth to lead pieces of the work. This project included developing new survey questions, which needed to be tested for understanding by youth. All three of us said we were interested in co-facilitating feedback sessions with youth to learn how they interpreted our survey questions. This was an exciting, surprising, and impactful experience. It helped us see the result of all our hard work and discussing the creation of the survey taught us about the perspectives and experiences of other youth and made us feel like researchers.
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