It’s Hard. It’s Messy. It’s Fun. It’s Necessary. Navigating the Tensions when Co-Researching With Youth Participants

We—the Coauthors

This paper was written by eight people. Rachel and Preeti are established researchers, which means they have a Ph.D. in Education and have led several research projects. They will be called Established Researchers (ER). Lois, Jahneal, Coral, Priya, Lucie, and Mahmoud are participants in the study and will henceforth be called Emerging Adult Co-Researchers (EACRs). The study itself (described below) has five more established researchers who worked with EACRs but did not lead the co-research process. Our standpoint in this longitudinal study is that if the research is about youth pathways, then youth must be our partners in conducting the study every step of the way. We chose to write this article together because we want researchers who study youth experiences to consider co-researching with participants, keeping in mind the inherent power structures that exist. We also want established researchers to pay attention to unintentional marginalization that could occur when following established approaches to research. As such, we eight researchers agreed that our meeting notes, correspondences, and reflective writings could be used as data for this article.

Anti-Adultist Approaches to Co-Researching in a Community of Practice

Our project utilizes a community of practice (CoP) theory (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) as a framework for how we conceptualize learning and participation on a research team (Chaffee et al., 2023). Communities of practice are dynamic intersections of individuals, activities, and tools; learning and the generation of knowledge are relational processes located between and among people with shared interests and goals and shaped by mutual engagement in sets of practices (beliefs, values, ways of acting and interacting, tasks, and activities) that enable collaborative engagement (Wenger et al., 2002). While a CoP is bound by specific ways of doing and being that are endorsed by leaders or “established practitioners,” participants negotiate their membership in the CoP, crafting and developing identities and deepening ways of acting and interacting related to who they want to be and become. Moving towards membership in a CoP requires that members see each other as participants and share opportunities to negotiate meaning together. It also means that members of the CoP recognize the expertise of each person and the contributions they can potentially make even if some of the members start at the periphery.

The research group in this study is a CoP. However, as with many CoPs, the process by which newcomers (in our case, the EACRs) are encultured into a CoP is not always fluid. Members take up, resist, and adapt identities and tools available in the CoP as their forms of engagement change over time. Members of a CoP may contest forms of practices that are connected to larger historical, political, and economic struggles, as practices and identities formed within one CoP overlaps with practices and identities in other CoPs (Holland & Lave, 2019). Wenger (1998) argues that having access to a community does not mean that all community members share common experiences. How one imagines or perceives the ways members of the CoP welcome (or do not welcome) specific identities can impact the ways a member participates in that community and how one engages in the CoP can impact how they experience that CoP. In our case, the ways in which specific forms of participation are valued or ignored by established members of the CoP has implications for how EACRs feel or do not feel like valued members of a community. Wenger argues that forms of participation must be recognized by other members in the CoP as legitimate forms of participation to “count.” This valuing has implications for how members decide to engage and the risks they do or do not take with their participation. How members perceive their alignment with the normative (and non-normative) practices of the CoP impacts their experiences in that community.

Inviting EACRs into a CoP to engage in co-research requires careful consideration of the ways that forms of expertise are acknowledged and fostered. Proefke and Barford (2023) posit that youth co-research is a distinct methodology, situated between the adult-led “youth-focused” non-participatory research that does not engage youth in the research process and “youth-led” highly participatory approaches like YPAR, where youth drive the research process. Operating “in the middle of this continuum of leadership” (Proefke & Barford, 2023, p. 26), youth co-research aims to foster collaboration between adults with professional expertise and youth with lived expertise, with the aim of “reframing the relationship” (p. 27) between adults and young people. This process requires a community of researchers to consider how and in what ways youth are included and and how and in what ways their authority and forms of expertise are present at various stages of the research process (London, 2007). Research teams engaged in projects aimed at high levels of youth inclusion and authority require the capacity of established researchers to cultivate spaces for ongoing dialogue and consideration of how to support youth in their development as young researchers without disempowering or tokenizing their contributions.

Building on our prior work examining anti-adultist approaches to co-researching with youth in museum contexts (Chaffee et al., 2024), we utilize the Typology of Youth Participation Empowerment (TYPE) Pyramid developed by Wong et al. (2010) as a heuristic for investigating our participatory methods. The TYPE Pyramid (see Figure 1) provides us a heuristic for identifying forms of participation, identifying the features of our co-researching process that enabled or hindered equitable participation and distinguishing when and how adultist perspectives are hindering youth voices, perspectives, and participation. The TYPE Pyramid also enables us to grapple with the ways in which, at times, our participatory methods shifted in and across participation types towards and away from shared control among adults and youth, leading us to ask ourselves: When, how, and what enabled more youth-driven forms of participation that positioned youth as major contributors, legitimate knowers, and decision makers? What forms of adultism were operating that led to more adult-driven forms of participation, where adults positioned youth in supporting roles? What was (and is) required to move the team towards a pluralistic shared sense of control? Collectively engaging in discussion of these questions allowed us to consider the ways in which our participatory practices did not always fit easily into one specific type of participation. The heuristic provided us insights into the reality that there are multiple ways to engage in this collaborative work and research teams can utilize different approaches for different means (Wong et al., 2010). Identifying which practices are driven by whom (i.e.,adults or youth) enables us to identify the mechanisms that can shift power dynamics in positive ways as well as hinder shared forms of participation.OPEN IN VIEWER

Study Context

In this section, we provide a brief background of our longitudinal study and the original intentions for engaging youth in our research community of practice. Staying in Science is a National Science Foundation-funded 10-year longitudinal study examining the academic and professional pathways of 368 emerging adults, currently in their early-to-mid-twenties. All the participants grew up in New York City (NYC) and participated in the New York City Science Research Mentoring Consortium (NYCSRMC)—a consortium of science research mentorship programs that provide internships to high school students at 27 academic and cultural institutions across NYC where the students work alongside scientists engaging in authentic science research for more than 100 hours. The hypothesis in the study is to document the pathways of these students who had formative science learning experiences early on. The study spans participants’ lives from high school through college and into the first years of graduate school and/or work and aims to identify the specific supports and barriers that shape participants’ pathways into and/or out of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees and occupations.

The longitudinal study has been guided by the following overarching research question: What characteristics mediate or impede youths’ persistence and flourishing in STEM careers? In addition to examining the factors associated with completion of a STEM major in college and factors associated with pursuing a STEM graduate degree program and career (MacPherson et al., 2024), the study also explores the following key constructs: opportunities to learn and engage in the practices of science and scientific research and how these opportunities shape academic and professional access and experiences, providing an opportunity yield for youth (Hammerness, Gupta, et al., 2024); the role of key relationships, including mentors and significant others, who provide support and resources to participants over time and in a variety of contexts (Chaffee et al., 2023; Gupta et al., 2025); how participants experience (or not) a sense of belonging in academic and professional spaces, and how overt and covert biases and microaggressions shape their experiences in these environments (Adams et al., 2024); the vital role of peers in youths’ sense of belonging (Chaffee et al., 2025), and the unique ways that youth flourish along their trajectories (Hammerness, Chaffee, et al., 2024). The study has 368 active participants, inclusive of the EACRs. In other words, all EACRs were high school students and agreed to be in the longitudinal study when they first joined one of the mentoring programs included in the study.

This project has seven ERs and six EACRs and was intentionally designed by ERs to include EACRs in order to ensure that their perspectives and voices informed the research. The goal was to integrate their lived experiences, understandings, and concerns, and their role was to edit survey and interview questions and interpret quantitative and qualitative data from the perspective of not only a co-researcher but a peer and participant, contributing important cultural and developmental sensitivity to this study. To recruit EACRs, ERs Rachel and Preeti created an application with specific criteria to recruit students who were interested in serving in a co-researcher role, explaining what it meant to be a co-researcher, including the time commitment and the types of activities an EACR would engage in. All EACRs selected were able to commit to the time and describe why this role would contribute to their emerging career interests. ERs did not expect any of the EACRs to consider social science research as a career, but rather to describe why they felt an experience of this type might help their overall career pathway. The EACR cohort selected represented the diversity of the mentoring sites, including ethno-racial diversity, and the diversity in types of schools in NYC. All EACRs would receive a stipend for completing the fellowship. ERs and EACRs met virtually a majority of the time, primarily in the evenings in order to accommodate schedules. A shared drive with folders became the key method for organizing notes, documents, and tasks completed. All EACRs were provided training on ethical research and obtained an Institutional Review Board certificate before engaging in any work.

EACRs did not have a say in the longitudinal study research questions, overall design, or the dissemination plan crafted for the study. However, EACRs have been consistently embedded in the process of conducting a large research study, including: reviewing relevant literature on youth pathways, designing both surveys and interview protocols, conducting interviews, analyzing qualitative and quantitative data, presenting findings at academic conferences and to National Science Foundation advisory boards, and co-authoring academic papers and reports.

Our team has been researching in collaboration for over nine years. Two co-authors, Lucie and Mahmoud, have participated as co-researchers on this study since they were in high school when the project began more than nine years ago; four co-authors, Lois, Jahneal, Coral, and Priya, have been co-researchers since they were in college but have been participants in the study since their high school years. Currently, all six EACRs are college graduates, a few have completed or are pursuing graduate degrees, and all are working. They are a demographically diverse group pursuing a variety of degrees and careers in the physical, social, and biomedical sciences, and reflect the age range and ethno-racial, socioeconomic, and first-generation identities and trajectories of our study participants.

When we began working together, we used the term “youth” to refer to the six co-researchers. This term is familiar to the field of education research and youth development, often defined as persons between the ages of 10 and 24 (United Nations Population Fund, 2017), and reflects that all six co-researchers were once youth participants in the longitudinal research study they joined as co-researchers. However, with time, we all came to realize that youth was not a category the co-researchers felt captured how they understood or defined themselves as college graduates and individuals in their early twenties, and rather should be referred to as emerging adults. Mainly being developed in the field of psychology, “emerging adult” literature has defined emerging adulthood as a distinct developmental period for individuals in industrialized nations between the ages of 18 and 25, a life stage characterized by significant normative transitions that is not consistent with adolescence nor adulthood (Arnett, 2000). Normative transitions in emerging adulthood include beginning college, entering the workforce, and moving away from one’s support system to pursue their education/career, all of which are associated with unique challenges, including an uncertainty of the future, financial concerns, and academic struggles (Lee & Dik, 2017). The distinct experiences that occur within this developmental period include an exploration of one’s identity, career trajectory, social network, and worldviews (Arnett, 2000; Lane et al., 2017). Emerging adulthood most closely encapsulates the experiences and current life stage of the co-researchers and study participants, as we are still navigating our own personal and career trajectories and undergoing transitions in our lives. The label of EACR reflects this idea of the participant researchers self-identifying as emerging adults.

Methods

To examine the features of our co-researching process that enabled or hindered equitable participation of all researchers, we used a grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) and specifically found the constant comparative method (Boeije, 2002) to be most helpful because we began by analyzing a set of documents which provided us with new insights and findings and triggered us to look at other documents. Our analytic process evolved over time as we began to see connections across datasets and grew to understand the value of continuously documenting our own co-research process. Over two years and multiple stages, as we analyzed our documentation, we continued to produce more documentation of our ongoing process of co-research. Below, we describe these stages in detail, providing rationale for our analytic approach that led us to the themes outlined in our findings (Table 1 provides a detailed description of our timeline, dataset, and analytic process over time.).

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Table 1.

Stages of Analysis

Stage	Guiding analytic question	Dataset
Stage 1: Fall 2023	Where and how were EACR voices and perspectives integrated or not integrated into the surveys and interview protocol versions over time?	Literature summaries written by EACRs to inform use and adaptation of survey scales and items and interview questions
		Meeting notes (include types, comments, etc.)
		Transcripts of meeting recordings (types of meetings and how many)
		Multiple versions of interview and survey protocols in shared draft that included item-by-item changes and comments by all ERs and EACRs on the study
		Emails and text messages between EACRs and CRs specific to the development of these instruments
		Recorded reflections/transcripts of conversations between CRs and EACRs discussing their reactions to the process of testing the interview protocol with each other
Stage 2: Winter 2024	What are the mechanisms that potentially shift the power balance between/among us? Did those shifts impact the shaping of/development of the protocols and are the shifts reflective of the power dynamics changing within the larger team?	Reflective memos generated by EACRs and ERs
Stage 3: Spring 2024	How has additional time on manuscripts that enabled interaction with established researchers in the whole study impacted your thinking around power dynamics? Has the structure of those experiences provided opportunities for recognition, growth and agency? Where do you see mechanisms for growth and where do you see adultism (or an adult-centrist bias) still operating?	Reflective memos generated by EACRs
		Meeting notes about co-authoring multiple manuscripts for publication
		Timeline of entire study with EACRs documenting their reflections of experiences on the larger team over multiple years

Counteracting Anti-Adulist Frameworks Through Research: Lessons Learned

There are inherent tensions that will always exist when established researchers and participant co-researchers are invited to work together because of power differentials. Engaging with each other in a critical reflection of our collaborative work required consistent effort to practice reflexivity; to examine our own biases, assumptions, and beliefs (about research, about participatory research, and about each other’s experiences and expertise); and to recognize if, when, and how those biases, assumptions, and beliefs shaped our individual and collective practices within the community of practice. What emerged repeatedly across our analysis of our dataset and in reflection with each other were the ways in which ERs consistently brought the frames of traditional research methods and rationale for why and how those methods should be used to the community. ERs are experts, those in the “center” of the CoP carrying schema and practices about data collection instruments and data collection approaches. They also brought decades of experience working as faculty or program directors with students dictating the rules for collaborative work, which mirrored traditional relationships of adult/youth or teacher/student. While ERs designed the study to include the voices and perspectives of participants—as in, research on youth must include youth—adultist frameworks of a teacher/student dynamic consistently informed how and in what ways they engaged or did not engage EACRs, even though the EACRs were participating not as students but as co-researchers. This caused the EACRs to remain at the periphery of the CoP and not be able to let their experiences and their expertise mediate the shifts in the data collection tools and approaches to collection.

Below, we provide two concrete cases of how EACR input was not invited early, leading to a disruption in equitable participation in research activities, and how the project team shifted practices to address the issue. We selected these two cases because they represent typical activities of any systematic study and are where we have evidence of where EACRs were marginalized. In each case, we present the story of the case, individual reflections on the experience from EACRs and ERs, and a shared reflection on what we learned from working through these experiences in search of more equitable forms of collaborative participation among all researchers. Attention will be paid in each case to 1) the structures that supported and/or impeded our ability to engage in more equitable practices that centered EACR voices/experiences and 2) the ways in which structures and practices were revised/redesigned in partnership to create a more inclusive approach to collaboration.

Discussion & Implications

Engaging with each other in a critical reflection of our collaborative work required consistent effort to practice reflexivity; to examine our own biases, assumptions, and beliefs (about research, about participatory research, and about each other’s experiences and expertise); and to recognize if, when, and how those biases, assumptions, and beliefs shaped our individual and collective practices within and across our research team. We show the ways in which, despite our best intentions, our research practices and adult perceptions about EACR expertise often reinvented inequitable relationships among established and emerging co-researchers.

We chose to use a community of practice framework because it offers us a way where experts and novices can come together for a shared goal and together work with tools, rules, and practices to accomplish tasks. That said, this framework originates from an apprenticeship model which clearly positions novices as learning from experts and specifically learning a trade while maintaining the integrity and authenticity of that trade. It assumes that the trade doesn’t change and the apprentices are committing to learning that trade from the experts. More recently, and in our case, the framework is used differently (Nicolini et al., 2022). The shared goal is not about learning to engage in social science research but rather to develop knowledge about youth pathways. The experts and novices are all learning and learning from each other, ideally. EACRs do learn skills of social science research, but ERs learn to critically examine established ways of researching, to collaborate differently than traditional PI-graduate student relationships, and to learn to share authority. Moving towards more pluralistic forms of participation in a community of practice is time-intensive; as our stories above demonstrate, it took many years together to shift towards a less adult-driven conceptualization of EACR roles and participation. This process required careful attention to the structures in place that limited EACR participation, as well as the necessary and often difficult process of recognizing how our practices upheld adultist perspectives of youth that positioned young people in symbolic ways that limited their voices and sense of empowerment. While we recognize that our process has not resulted in shared control of all aspects of our work, our collective determination to move towards a more pluralistic CoP has enabled a co-research process where collaboration draws more deeply on the voices and expertise of young people. Hence, our movement towards more shared forms of control within co-research has and will continue to shift, as we navigate our collaborative work, aware of the ways in which we slip forward and backwards into and out of more symbolic forms of participation.

Utilizing a community of practice and anti-adultist frameworks draws our attention to how we—both ERs and EACRs—grappled with how best to balance forms of participation that are not adult-led without burdening EACRs with the expectations of already having expertise in systematic social science research practices. As these case stories show, inclusion-only approaches in the research process can limit our perceptions of what EACRs desire and can accomplish. Our team had to realize that for collaboration be effective and impactful, inclusion, recognition, and sharing authority must operate together; it was only in coming to recognize and trust EACRs’ developing expertise and authority in the practices we had spent years engaging in with them that we were able to intentionally flip our process from a more adult-led to a more youth-led approach in specific areas of our study. Sometimes, adults need to recognize that they have prepared youth enough and now their role is to get out of youth’s way.

Working across varying levels of experience and expertise also requires consideration of what forms of participation are accessible, inclusive, and also practical. Co-research is time-intensive and requires adults to be in a constantly evolving relationship with emerging adults and advocating for their participation—specifically, forms of their participation that enable them to develop their skills and draw on their expertise over time. This process requires careful attention to the dynamics in relationships with each other and to the larger research team that are not co-authors on this paper. We join researchers who are also grappling with effective ways to address issues of power when engaging in youth co-research work. We recognize that these case examples do not address the issues of power between the established researchers on the larger team or among the six EACRs. Each of us brings a complex set of identities and positionalities to our team (Kulmala et al., 2024); all of us working on this longitudinal pathways study are aware of the ways that young people are and are not positioned to be recognized as capable research partners in mentored research and the ways that institutional pressures and categories of “researcher” shape and normalize specific ways of interacting with each other. Well-intentioned comments can highlight privilege necessitating reflection, and the power of humility and receptiveness can re-balance power (Renick & Turchi, 2024). In our study, we continue to witness this issue of unintentionally leaving EACRs out of a conversation, and even when they are part of a meeting, ERs discuss with each other, and almost as an afterthought, we request input from the EACRs. These instances are notable moments for established researchers not only to acknowledge the situation but to plan differently for next time.

Conclusion & Recommendations

Our paper intended to provide insights into tensions that inherently exist when established researchers partner with participants in the research as co-researchers. The case stories became a way for us to share the nature of the tensions and the intentional ways that structures and processes needed to change in order to open the possibility for authentic participation. As the title of this paper suggests, it is hard and messy, but we hope that in reading this paper, you feel compelled to engage in social science research with a different approach, one that not only positions participants as co-researchers but uses practices that intentionally redistribute power. Our recommendation is that when researchers think about crafting a research study about youth, invite those who are the subject of the study early on to co-develop the project, even if some type of participatory approach is not fully possible in the actual research. Don’t automatically assume ways of working together that privilege an established researcher’s work life. Build in time for developing relationships to learn about each other’s lives and create trust. Build in time for co-creating processes, and reviewing and revising them as needed. At the American Museum of Natural History, we have committed to co-researching with audiences who are the focus of a study and have initiated several projects working collaboratively with emerging adults. We are learning as we go along and recognize this work is new and requires a mental reframing of how we are trained to engage in research.