Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is a form of community-based participatory research that engages young people in informed, active roles to address issues affecting them and enact change. YPAR seeks to develop young people's existing knowledge and engage them in all stages of the research process. Studies have found YPAR benefits young people by improving their leadership, communication, and research skills while increasing their critical awareness and empowerment.

1. • This section provides some information on Youth Participatory Action
Research (YPAR) (another approach within PR) that informs thinking
around working with young people. It outlines some of the challenges of
working with young people in a PR paradigm to develop your thinking
about how these can be offset in practice.
• This section looks specifically at considerations of working with young
people in a school context, and the ethical implications of research with
young people.
4. Researching with Young People

2. Y O U T H - L E D PA R T I C I PAT O R Y A C T I O N
R E S E A R C H
• YPAR is a form of CBPR that works with young people towards them to taking
informed, active, agentive roles in issues and contexts where they are
affected (Ozer & Douglas, 2015).
• This is achieved through critical consciousness (Freire, 1996) and dialogue to
inform actions that benefit their lives and communities.
• As with other PR and PAR strands, YPAR seeks to engage and develop existing,
everyday knowledges of young people in a process of inquiry and knowledge
production, research and action on as many levels of the participatory process as
possible to achieve change and transformation in social contexts (Ozer, 2016). It
is ‘an epistemological framework, pedagogical approach, and research method
that counters deficit views of youth’ (Wright, 2020:35).

3. • In research, youth participation is held to be a marker of quality within
interventions involving young people. It is variously framed as an issue of
social justice, a platform for positive development, a medium for active
citizenry, a human right, and a strategy for nation-building’ (Cahill
& Davdand, 2018:243).
• Lohmeyer (2020) determines the period of youth as a time where the
young person is an expert in generating knowledge about themselves
and the world, and that research is an opportunity for young people to be
active in this knowledge development to change their lived realties for the
better.
Y O U T H - L E D PA R T I C I PAT O R Y A C T I O N
R E S E A R C H

4. • Aspirations for social justice are clear in the contexts identified in Kim’s (2016) literature review
of youth-led research, which notes topics and issues addressed to include health and mental
health; violence; drug and tobacco use; family, school, community-based problems; and
program/service/ measurement development.
• Kim’s review also found that PAR projects frequently engaged with marginalised young people,
such as ‘low-income students, immigrants, women, people of color, or youth in disadvantaged
communities’ (2016:43).
• Wright (2020) also notes that YPAR projects have been demonstrably supportive for young people
experiencing racism, classism, and xenophobia. The advantages arising from PR work with youth
in Kim’s literature review were measured in the development of young people’s leadership,
communication, and research skills; critical awareness of issues relevant to their communities and
in wider social contexts; and confidence and empowerment (2016). These benefits were
sometimes extended from the micro experiences of individual young people to macro contexts of
their communities.
Y O U T H - L E D PA R T I C I PAT O R Y A C T I O N
R E S E A R C H

5. • Kim (2016) also found that the literature dominantly sat within the PAR
tradition of using a wide range of methods for data collection, and that
these were dominantly qualitative and visual.
• Researchers using visual or creative methods argue that the combination
of PABR and YPAR in projects with young people are dually beneficial
because the tools and perspectives of PABR (creative, evolutionary,
multimodal) further enable the research skills and tools for youth in YPAR
to challenge the deficit discourses of youth (Wright, 2020).
Y O U T H - L E D PA R T I C I PAT O R Y A C T I O N
R E S E A R C H

6. A C T I V I T Y
• Watch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo9RiXpVjYQ
• What were the benefits of YPAR noted by the young
people and those working with them?