Despite some evidence that being an activist, particularly during adolescence, can positively affect well-being, activism has been relatively neglected in both psychology and youth civic engagement research. This study aimed to address this gap by exploring how being an activist as a teenager can positively affect personal development and well-being. Seven focus groups comprising adolescent human rights activists were conducted in classrooms throughout the United Kingdom. Inductive thematic analysis was used to identify four dominant themes-A place to go, Power in numbers, Skillingup, and In it together-which are discussed in relation to existing literature. Because findings from this study suggest that there are a number of positive psychological benefits to being a youth activist, implications for psychology and youth civic engagement are also considered. INTRODUCTIONAccording to the literature, being an activist can have a number of psychological benefits such as developing a sense of mastery and displaying higher levels of subjective vitality (e.g., Gilster, 2012;Klar & Kasser, 2009). Because adolescence is such an important developmental phase of life (e.g., Marcia, 1966), being an activist as a teenager could have particular benefits for well-being and personal development such as developing a sense of belonging and sociopolitical awareness (e.g., Morsillo & Prilleltensky, 2007). Activism would therefore seem a relevant research area for psychology and related fields such as "youth civic engagement." However, there are still gaps in the research on the positive effect of activism on adolescent well-being within the fields of psychology and youth civic engagement in that both have tended to focus primarily on "service-giving" activities such as volunteering and have not necessarily recognized activism as a distinct activity worthy of separate study in its own right (Gilster, 2012;Watts & Flanagan, 2007). This study hopes to address these gaps by exploring how being involved in activism can affect the well-being and personal development of youth activists.A broad view of the term well-being is used for the purposes of this study. While the focus has been firmly on the subjective psychological well-being and personal development of the participants, our conceptualization goes (Shamir, 1990), resilience (Zimmerman et al., 2013) and empowerment (Kieffer, 1984), as outlined in a number of community-oriented well-being models (Di Martino, Eiroa-Orosa, & Arcidiacono, 2017 that activism is a distinct activity that involves engaging critically in projects that try to change the community or societal status quo as opposed to service-giving activities such as community volunteering which tend to work within the current social system. However, others have conceptualized activism as falling under the general concept of volunteering (e.g., Wilson, 2000). The rest of this section is dedicated to an overview of relevant research on activism, as defined above, followed by the specific research question and rationa...

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