Dialogical Consent Practices in Research With 2S-LGBTQ+ Youth

Abstract

The limits of research consent processes come into quick relief when researching with marginalized youth, limits we have tested and contested in a research partnership with LU and GC in Canada. LU is a horizontal research collective, while GC is a 2S-LGBTQ+ non-profit. Together we initiated a project in 2022 to study Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) practices with community organizations, developing a series of youth workshops. We grounded our ethics protocol in GC's everyday consent practices in work with youth, including candid conversations about power, intersectionality, respect, identity, and language. We co-developed a video consent process to facilitate youth self-consent in the workshops. While parents, guardians, or caregivers often must consent on behalf of youth, this may pose risks for 2S-LGBTQ+ youth in non-affirming homes and may further deepen their alienation or exclude them from participation. Importantly, GC does not require parental, guardian, or caregiver consent for accessing their services but provides for youth self-consent. Youth self-consent, moreover, is supported by human rights, educational, and social work practices. GC's consent practices were integrated into our research including our ethics protocol. Our findings identify both challenges in having self-consent accepted by the REB, the precarity of nonprofits and long-term community-engaged research with short-term funding; and successes in strong community relationships, interviews, and innovative methodologies. We propose a methodological framework for dialogical youth self-consent that can support intersectional 2S-LGBTQ+ youth access to participation in research, in turn supporting paths to agency through expressing their ideas and perspectives. Moreover, we foreground consent as being continuously negotiated and reaffirmed in dialogue with 2S-LGBTQ+ youth themselves, highlighting the transformative potential of participatory self-consent processes for youth.