Youth as experts of their own lives: collage creation to engage adolescent researchers in topic identification.

Abstract

This report describes the process of collage creation designed for Michigan Youth Health (MYHealth) students to generate and prioritize research topics related to adolescent health and wellness challenges. MYHealth is a youth-partnered research training program grounded in youth participatory action research methods and designed to encourage high school students to explore STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and health research fields. Within the MYHealth program, students partner with academic health researchers to conduct their own research projects on an adolescent health topic. During the initial training, MYHealth students identify possible research topics that form the basis for research they conduct throughout the academic year. Integrating elements of arts-based, participatory, and narrative research methods, a collage creation process was used to stimulate, generate and prioritize research topics for future planned research with students. We detail the collage creation process and provide three illustrative examples of students' collages and how the collages helped students generate and prioritize research topics. We conclude with student reflections on the collage creation process and lessons learned regarding the successful use of this method to engage high school students in STEM and health research and to identify relevant research topics in a youth research education program.