Successful approaches to engaging African-American youth in community-based research

My Identity is Community (MiC) is a research collective in which adolescents become co-researchers, along with the author, in order to delve deeper into the “everyday understandings” of young African Americans residing in an urban neighborhood which has undergone and is undergoing neighborhood change. The youth are existing members of a community-based organization, and during the research phase conducted quantitative and qualitative data collection and analyses. The use of narrative analysis, an emerging method in the public health and youth development fields, empowered participants to produce poetic texts to make sense of their lives and their home, school, and neighborhood contexts. Poetry, and other expressive mechanisms, has been shown to draw out powerful emotions from historically oppressed groups that other methodologies might not be able to capture. As co-researchers in our collective, the young people are acknowledged as “experts” of issues pertaining to their neighborhood.