Power,Privilege,and Precarity: Attempts to Conduct Ethical Youth Participatory Action Research as Early Career Researchers

Abstract

Though community-based participatory research (CBPR) boasts a robust history, challenges to conducting such work ethically and equitably remain. Common difficulties, such as addressing power dynamics and navigating mutuality, are heightened when doing participatory research with young people, specifically youth participatory action research (YPAR). Additional obstacles also emerge when engaging in such research as junior scholars, who lack tenure and occupy more precarious positions within academia. To elucidate these hurdles and illuminate the labor required to traverse them, we draw upon our experiences as early career academics facilitating YPAR projects with young people who have been historically marginalized. Employing an autoethnographic approach, we utilize qualitative data sources including field notes and reflective memos, from which three themes emerged after iterative rounds of reflection and review. Through descriptive vignettes, we unpack how we attended to positionality and power, interrogated shared benefit and mutuality, and engaged with the unique complexities of working with young people—as informed by our specific identities. In examining our experiences and their alignment with prior research, we aim to expand upon existing literature that has explored best practices within CBPR, but with a specific focus on youth-adult partnerships and consideration of the realities of junior scholars. It is our hope that this discussion will support early career researchers who wish to conduct YPAR but are unsure how to do so given their particular positionalities, by making visible the often-invisible work involved.

Keywords

adolescents community-based participatory research qualitative methods race/ethnicity youth

Through previous work on the practices and processes of conducting community-based participatory research (CBPR), scholars have highlighted various challenges to enacting such work in ethical and equitable ways. For example, how can researchers effectively navigate power dynamics between themselves and community members? Power is complex, manifesting differently in certain spaces and existing across a range of levels and forms (Gaventa, 2019). To accomplish CBPR’s goals of democratizing knowledge production, power dynamics in community-academic partnerships necessitate interrogation (Minkler, 2004; Wallerstein et al., 2019). One aspect of these power dynamics is the relationship researchers hold to the community with which they are seeking to partner—are they an insider or an outsider, meaning are they already fully embedded members of the group, or are they removed from it, seeking to build a partnership through their joint research (Adler & Adler, 1987)?

Being either an insider or an outsider will have differential impacts when it comes to power dynamics. “Insiders” may have the benefit of holding shared lived experience, language, and identity, which can lead to a certain level of community and trust and, in turn, potentially reduce inequitable power dynamics (Adler & Adler, 1987). There are also drawbacks, however, as holding dual roles as both a community member and a researcher can lead to confusion for both the participants and the researchers and possibly further complicate power dynamics (Adler & Adler, 1987; Asselin, 2003). While “outsiders” do not need to contend with this role confusion, they may face challenges related to building connections to the community, understanding community context, and navigating the unequal power dynamics produced by the privileged identities they hold, which may not be shared by community members (Chavez et al., 2008; Green, 2004; Minkler, 2004; Wallerstein et al., 2019).

When working with communities they are not a part of, researchers must be cognizant of differences in identity, specifically in relation to privilege and oppression, which also have implications for power dynamics. CBPR often involves individuals who have been historically marginalized, such as low-income communities and communities of color—communities of which researchers may not be a member (Coleman et al., 2021; Green, 2004; Minkler, 2004). To traverse these power dynamics, attention must be paid to race and privilege. As Chavez and colleagues (2008) explain, navigating histories of oppression and building multiracial collaborations are “part of the dance” of doing CBPR (p. 93), including acknowledging differences and practicing humility (Chavez et al., 2008; Green, 2004; Wallerstein et al., 2019). For White researchers, this also includes holding a reciprocal view of power, one that does not solely examine how historically marginalized groups have been denied power but also how dominant groups have held power, to better understand the ways our own power manifests and can be a barrier to liberatory research goals (Coleman et al., 2021).

Concepts of reflexivity can serve as a tool for community-engaged researchers to conduct this kind of self-examination. Commonly discussed in qualitative research, reflexivity entails critically analyzing oneself (e.g., our interpretations, beliefs, perspectives) as a part of the research process (Walsh, 2003). While reflexivity is often thought to increase the rigor and validity of research produced, when extended to the entire research process, it can also help researchers to navigate ethical dilemmas in the research process (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004). By turning the reciprocal lens onto ourselves as community-based researchers, we can better understand our identities and how those identities may influence others.

Another challenge related to power is effectively addressing shared benefit and mutuality. One of the goals of CBPR is to conduct research of interest and use to communities (Campano et al., 2015). However, even in participatory projects, benefits derived may favor the researcher, who typically has more to gain professionally and monetarily, especially since academic norms often limit how much community partners can be compensated (Felner, 2020). Similarly, the mere act of publishing from the stories of participants can be exploitative (Parson, 2019) despite this frequently being a necessity for faculty. Addressing these mismatches between academic expectations and community interests can be particularly difficult for graduate students or early career researchers, who hold less power and thus exist more precariously within the academy (Felner, 2020).

These tensions are often elevated when working with young people, such as when conducting youth participatory action research (YPAR). YPAR seeks to center the lived experiences of youth, acknowledging that they have unique insight into issues that are directly impacting them (Anyon et al., 2018). In such projects, youth drive the research process, from study conceptualization to dissemination of results. While YPAR can offer a multitude of benefits for young people, their communities, and fields of research (Bertrand, 2018; Desai, 2019; Ozer, 2017), these youth-adult partnerships entail additional complexity. Common challenges include addressing ethical considerations when youth are under the age of 18 (Cullen & Walsh, 2020; Teixeira et al., 2021), navigating youth’s schedules when they are busy with competing responsibilities like school, family, or work (Anderson, 2020), and combating adultism in an authentic way to elevate youth voice (Bettencourt, 2020).

Bell (1995) defines adultism as, “the systematic mistreatment and disrespect of young people” (p. 2), wherein youth are often silenced because age is associated with experience and knowledge (Bell, 1995; Bettencourt, 2020). Accessibility and inclusion can also pose challenges when seeking to center youth voices that are often silenced, such as youth who live in poverty and may have access to fewer resources (Kirshner, 2010; Toraif et al., 2021). To address this, some have encouraged incorporating a stipend for youth researchers (Bradbury-Jones & Taylor, 2015), while others suggest that paying youth for their efforts might feel “exploitive rather than empowering” (Campbell & Trotter, 2007, p. 37).

Current Study

Informed by these nuanced challenges, this paper draws upon two junior scholars’ experiences of conducting YPAR with young people who have been historically marginalized to make visible the often-hidden work necessary in such collaborations. Specifically, we utilize ethical reflexivity (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004) to highlight three themes that exemplify some of this unseen or invisible labor (Jimenez et al., 2023): attending to positionality and power, interrogating shared benefit and mutuality, and engaging with the unique complexities of working with young people. Our lessons learned are informed by our positionalities as White women facilitating such work early in our careers, before the security of tenure. It is our hope that the vignettes and reflections shared help advance understanding not just of how to ethically collaborate with youth on research, but also how to do so while attending to both privilege and precarity.

Method

Researchers

Jennifer Renick

I am a White woman who comes from an upper-middle class family and my interest in community-based and youth-led research is informed by my experiences as a youth activist in high school. Although my doctoral degree is in education, my research draws heavily on community psychology, with its ethos of social justice and the value of community collaboration (Angelique & Kyle, 2002). While completing my PhD, I facilitated a research-practice partnership with a middle school, which became a site for YPAR projects. Having grown up in Southern California, where the school was located, I had a certain familiarity with the geographic region but little prior experience with the specific city in which the school was located. The YPAR project described in this paper was collaboratively designed with school stakeholders, including administrators, counselors, and teachers, and focused on improving school climate, meaning students could select any area of their school they wanted to change for their research topic. For a complete description of this YPAR project, see Renick and Reich (2023).

Jenn Turchi

I am a White female who comes from an upper-middle class family. As a trained sociologist, we often focus our research on inequality and the ways in which institutions and structures impact individuals’ lives; however, classical sociological training does not focus on collaborating with those in the community or directly impacted. My desire to utilize YPAR as the framework for my research stems from my volunteer and advocacy efforts after moving to Memphis, Tennessee. I quickly recognized that I had valuable resources (i.e., funding and time flexibility) that I wanted to share with youth in my community. At first, this included attending youth-led community events, where I did a lot of authentic listening and relationship building. I was often asked to join planning sessions with youth on particular trainings, but it was not until these youth wanted to educate our newly elected local Juvenile Court Judge and District Attorney about the systemic harms many of them had directly experienced that I had the opportunity to collaborate on a YPAR project with them. This project was designed by the youth and involved coming to campus, engaging in part of a college course with current college students, and designing and co-facilitating a community town hall.

Setting Description

Although we led YPAR projects in two different geographical locations (West Coast vs. the midsouth), we both predominantly worked with Black and Brown youth who have grown up in communities with fewer resources than their White peers. The YPAR project that Jennifer discusses was conducted in partnership with a Title 1 middle school in Southern California, referred to in this paper as Marigold Middle School. Most of the students at this school are Latine (69%) and qualify for free or reduced lunch (66%). School staff collaborated with Jennifer to design a participant recruitment process that would ensure students in the YPAR project were representative of the overall school population. In total, 14 students participated in the YPAR group consistently, and most were students of color (43% Latine, 21% Multiracial). The YPAR work by Jenn and collaborators described in this paper took place in Memphis, Tennessee. Memphis is a predominantly Black city (63.9%) with a long history of racial segregation, economic and community divestment, and systemic racism. All 12 youth that have led YPAR projects with Jenn identified as Black or Latine; most live in the poorest communities in Memphis, and over three quarters of them are directly impacted by the criminal legal system.

Analytic Approach

This paper utilizes an autoethnographic methodological approach, wherein we reflected on our personal experiences facilitating YPAR projects, holding dual roles as participants and later analysts, and examining our own practices (Eriksson et al., 2012). Drawing upon ethnographic research, which requires meaningful and sustained contact with communities (O’Reilly, 2012), autoethnography extends this to connect researchers’ experiences with the research process, highlighting the ways in which one’s positionality intersects and interacts with those with whom we collaborate (Poulos, 2021). Data sources used include field notes and reflective memos, with analysis consisting of iterative rounds of individual and joint reflection on our practices. Through this process, the authors identified three main themes and selected exemplary vignettes from each of their sites to showcase their findings.

Results

Attending to Positionality and Power

In our respective projects, we each had to navigate our various insider and outsider identities, while simultaneously considering the local historical context and acknowledging our own privilege. For example, Jennifer was conducting community-engaged research at a middle school in a location with which she was familiar, in the county where she grew up. This afforded her some amount of insider credibility because she could relate to certain experiences of staff and students, due to this shared geographic context. However, the specific city where this middle school was placed was not one in which she had lived experience, limiting her ability to more intimately understand the particular context of this community and its local history. This highlights the importance of always remembering when one is not a member of a certain community, even if an individual has some amount of “insider” insight, due to the inherent complexities of power (Gaventa, 2019).

Aware of this nuance, prior to beginning her community partnership, Jennifer worked to learn about the local context, through reviewing news reports, publicly available data, and school websites. As a White person with class privilege who was collaborating with a school that served predominantly low-income, Latine students, Jennifer had to draw upon her previous and ongoing work in activist organizations to develop critical skills to help her attend to her privilege and to understand systems of oppression in the specific context of this community-based research. Prior to engaging in any research projects, she spent time embedded in the school site, conducting informal observations and asking questions to learn more about the local context from community members, all of which were informed by her status as an outsider to the community and her positionality as a researcher.

Jenn traversed similar terrain when beginning her collaboration and also had to address when mistakes were made as the partnership progressed; attending to positionality and power is not something that occurs only at the start of a community partnership, but throughout it. One example occurred when she attended a meeting with her youth collaborators that was focused on gaining access to local elected officials, to express frustrations regarding the exclusion of youth voice on issues directly impacting them. In this meeting, Jenn made a comment from her academic lens that upset the youth, and they (rightly so) asked her very clearly to “check her privilege,” using their method of “calling out with the intent to bring in.” The group then had a thoughtful conversation about how Jenn’s positions of privilege (having a PhD, being White, and holding greater access to decision makers because of her university role) could be leveraged to help youth achieve their goal of having a seat at the table. Because of this conversation, Jenn was more aware going forward of how her privilege allows her to move in and out of certain spaces and the need to ensure she is always including and giving credit to youth voices when providing evidence or recommendations for policy changes.

What Jenn took away from the interaction was that the youth were not upset because she made the comment; they simply wanted her to reflect on where the comment came from and how her position of privilege influenced it. Because power is complex and often hidden (Gaventa, 2019), scholars conducting CBPR must practice humility to be receptive when community partners name differences in power and the ways in which researchers may be causing harm because of their privilege. Attending to positionality and power is often deeply personal and always relational, imbued in all interactions within CBPR and existing in quiet moments between researchers and community members. This also means this work can be invisible, especially for researchers who are not familiar with conducting CBPR, but it is an essential and continuous task needed to build equitable partnerships between researchers, especially those from privileged backgrounds, and community members, especially those who have been historically marginalized.

Interrogating Shared Benefit and Mutuality

A core value of CBPR is mutual and shared benefit for all involved. However, for individuals conducting such work as pre-tenure faculty or graduate students, it can be a challenge to balance demands from the academy (e.g., to publish, to complete a dissertation, to obtain grants, etc.) alongside a desire to center community interests, which may not align with academic timelines or goals. As such, both authors had to consider what true mutuality looks like when partnering with young people, while also thinking expansively about shared benefits, as mutuality is not always simple or clear, especially for junior scholars.

As a community-engaged researcher, Jennifer seeks to identify projects of mutual interest, while prioritizing the desires of the community first. When partnering with Marigold Middle School, that meant not initiating any studies wherein the focus had not been surfaced by a school stakeholder—either via a direct ask or by reflecting on something she had heard during observations. In addition, to manage her research time effectively in early conversations about these projects, Jennifer sought to strike a balance between time and output. A project that was a lighter lift did not necessitate any traditional academic outcomes (e.g., running analysis on existing school data), like a paper or a presentation. However, when a project was more time intensive (e.g., a school-wide multi-method survey), she had a conversation early about the possibility of also writing about it in some capacity. This was aided by her advisor who helped community partners understand Jennifer’s position as a graduate student, with milestones to achieve toward graduation and a CV to build to be employable. Similar to the initiation of projects, when academic outputs were pursued, Jennifer would identify research products that were desirable to the community first, such as sharing results in staff meetings or creating infographics in English and Spanish.

Through her YPAR work, Jennifer found additional norms needed to be created that gave the youth power in decision-making to enhance mutuality. Due likely to broader societal norms, many students came to the group expecting Jennifer (as the adult) to tell them what to do or perhaps listen to their ideas but ultimately override them. It was important to build relationships and establish community guidelines that created a comfortable space for youth to express their ideas, as well as design scaffolded structures to assist them in developing their ideas (e.g., brainstorming sessions in meetings, offering multiple modalities to participate, including time to reflect and share at a future session, etc.). However, Jennifer had to hold this desire to enhance mutuality for participating youth, while also considering her own position as a graduate student. When proposing a YPAR study as a part of her dissertation, she was warned by well-meaning faculty about the time-consuming nature of YPAR, particularly as a graduate student who would soon be on the job market.

Jenn navigated related challenges as a junior faculty member working to enhance her research portfolio. At the start of a new project with a group that Jenn had been volunteering with for almost 2 years, she worried about how to bring up her new role as a tenure-track faculty member with funding with the group, which would formalize their collaboration and increase accountability now that funding was to be involved. Her concern was that this shift would lead them to see her now as a university researcher, instead of as an advocate with and for them, and thus feel that she was just going to be using them, rather than meaningfully partnering. To address these concerns, when she broached the idea of the research project with them, she was very clear that, because she had received funding for it, there would now be requirements for her to report back to her funders. Jenn explained what that meant in regard to outputs (e.g., conference presentations and papers) and made sure everyone understood. Jenn let the youth know that the project and the funding were there to support their efforts and that this project was still in their hands despite the academic components now involved. The youth seemed to understand the demands on Jenn’s time and were genuinely excited to get to work together in a new capacity. The group’s director was also excited about the research skills that the youth would be learning and felt that this new endeavor would benefit the group as a whole beyond just this specific project.

Even despite this alignment in benefit between Jenn and her community partners and the clear communication about how the addition of academic funding would change the partnership, there have still been ongoing challenges to maneuver. For example, the group has been slow to get organized, and the funding is only for one year, highlighting the difficulty of mutuality when academic and community timelines do not match. This has created a struggle for Jenn as she tries to advance the project forward, due to being accountable to funders, while also being aware of the lived reality of the youth involved. These young people only have so much time to give and have other responsibilities, like school, work, and their own desires for the group’s strategic plan for the year, outside of this funded project (Anderson, 2020). Again, this continuous navigation of mutuality in community-based research is time-consuming and complex, especially for early career scholars, but also often invisible, since some approaches to community-engaged research simply prioritize academic outputs, neglecting the needs of the community (Heymann et al., 2016). However, this work is necessary because mutuality in CBPR is not something that occurs without concerted effort on behalf of researchers.

Engaging With the Unique Complexities of Working With Young People

Working with youth in particular poses some distinct challenges for community-engaged researchers. Regardless of one’s background, one will never be an “insider” when partnering with young people (unless you still currently are a young person), positioning all adult researchers as “outsiders” in this capacity. When Jennifer conducted the YPAR project she completed for her dissertation, she was in her late 20s—more than double the age of most of the middle school students with whom she was collaborating. The early adolescent experience had changed drastically since her own middle school years, and she had to be cognizant of that when collaborating with youth. Further complicating this dynamic, young people’s default seemed to be to relate to her as an authority figure, due to societal norms of adultism. Jennifer made it a point to let students know they could refer to her by her first name, but many would still call her Ms. Renick, referring to her as they would a teacher.

This dynamic also appeared in how the students felt power should be held within the group. When the students were engaged in ongoing discussions about decisions to be made for their research project, some would recommend Jennifer just make the final decision, often implying she “knew best.” Adultism is deeply embedded in many societal structures, so it naturally manifested in this group as who the youth participants felt held expertise, something amplified by Jennifer’s education level and association with a university. To collaborate equitably with youth, Jennifer had to be mindful of this hierarchy and resist her own occasional impulses to take on a greater role of authority, especially when difficulties were emerging in decision-making. When students were struggling to make a decision, it was easy to see how she could step in and direct the process toward the outcome she thought was best—showing her own bias toward adult perspectives. In addition to checking herself, Jennifer needed to facilitate a developmentally appropriate group, in which young people could be autonomous, and be mindful of their particular needs as middle schoolers. The role of adults in research collaborations with youth includes adequately scaffolding opportunities for them to develop their agency and autonomy in such projects, to create spaces in which young people can meaningfully hold power (Ozer, 2017).

Unsurprisingly, these challenges were not unique to Jennifer’s project. The youth that Jenn continues to work with live in historically marginalized communities and have few resources available to them. Adding an additional layer of complexity, all are justice-impacted or justice-involved, meaning most adults that they interact with assume that they do not have anything to contribute to efforts to create change in the systems that continue to oppress them. To combat these stereotypes across the broader community, Jenn always turns to the youth initially to ask them about their opinions, recommendations, and experiences. She lets the youth talk first and lead the discussion, only providing her own recommendations when asked. The organization with which Jenn collaborates also has strategies in place that attend to the realities of the young people involved in this work. To alleviate the financial hurdle of participating in YPAR programs, they provide youth participants with stipends to compensate them for their efforts and address other needs like transportation. The adult leaders in the organization recognize that the youth who should be centered in the work are also more likely to be excluded simply because they need to help their family with financial needs; to eliminate that possible barrier, youth are paid at least $10 per hour, without a limit of the hours for which they can be compensated. Several youth participants have noted that the stipend allowed them to get involved with the research, as they no longer need to find an after-school job.

Another strategy Jenn utilizes to attend to the complexities of working with youth is to let the youth know that she is there to learn from them and elevate that new knowledge when that occurs. For example, during one of the group’s planning sessions, they were reviewing some concepts that had been discussed in the prior meeting, and one youth used a fantastic analogy, stating: “Our health is like a mixing board when making music. You have dials that you move up and down that affect the final result. Resources are the levers, and our health is the musical outcome from the mixing.” Jenn told the student that she thought his analogy was brilliant and much better than any that she had used prior and asked if she could incorporate it into future course lectures, giving him credit. He was so excited that he would be incorporated into future classes and said “Of course! That’s so cool!” This provided tangible evidence that expertise was held by the youth, and that adults, like Jenn, could learn from them. Ultimately, CBPR with youth adds an additional layer of complexity when it comes to amplifying community perspectives and collaborating equitably. This nuance, however, can be obscured, especially without a critical consideration of adultism. Specific attention and intention are needed to address and navigate these complexities to meaningfully collaborate with young people.

Conclusion

Although facilitating YPAR is not without its challenges, the impacts on young people and their communities can be significant (Anyon et al., 2018; Ozer, 2017). As scholars move beyond the walls of campus and recognize that traditional research can cause harm to the communities we seek to support (Tuck, 2009; Wallerstein et al., 2019), it is important to make visible the invisible work (Jimenez et al., 2023) necessary to navigate community-engaged research effectively and ethically, especially when it comes to working with young people. As discussed in this paper, such tasks include attending to positionality and power, interrogating shared benefits and mutuality, and engaging with the unique complexities of working with young people. Through our vignettes, we hope to offer insight into how to address these challenges, particularly as junior scholars occupying less stable footing in the academy, as well as individuals with privilege who are seeking to meaningfully collaborate with young people who have been historically marginalized. Ultimately, though YPAR can be a fraught endeavor, especially for those without the security of tenure, junior scholars can make intentional choices to build ethical and equitable partnerships and, in turn, help to produce research that advances community change.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jennifer Renick

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