Girl Driven Research Project: Youth-led participatory action research

Girl Driven Research Project (hereafter GDRP) is a girl-specific youth-led participatory action research project, in which a group of 12-19 year old young women select a social justice issue facing their community to research and act upon. GDRP runs concurrently with the school year at a youth-serving agency in Chicago and is supported by adult allies. We conceptualize “girl-specific” to mean any person who identifies as female, inclusive of transgender young women. We define “youth-led” to be a process in which young people are involved in all levels and aspects of programming from planning, facilitation, and implementation, to evaluation and dissemination. GDRP empowers young women to be experts about their own lives and about issues impacting their communities. Additionally, participants gain practical employment and academic skills as well as have the opportunity to build relationships with other young women. Throughout the project year, youth-leaders develop and present social justice and research workshops in order to identify a research topic and methods of significance to the group of youth researchers. The research topic and methods are decided upon by group consensus. Our presentation will focus on developing youth-led models of participatory action research, as well as present curriculum and evaluation outcomes from our current GDRP cycle. Additionally, youth leaders will present on the current research project, exploring how adultism impacts the portrayal of youth in news media, from conception to implementation, as well as data analysis. Finally, we will address lessons learned, challenges and triumphs of girl-specific youth-led participatory action research.