Engaging youth in mixed methods community-based participatory research projects

My Identity is Community (MiC) is a research collective in which the author collaborates with staff and adolescents at a community-based organization as co-researchers in order to delve deeper into the “everyday understandings” of youth of color residing in an urban neighborhood which has undergone and is undergoing neighborhood change. During the research phase, the youth 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 the collective, the young people are acknowledged as “experts” of issues pertaining to their neighborhood, the community-based organization's staff build their capacity in research methods, and the author fosters a community-university partnership.