Engaging youth in post-disaster research: Lessons learned from a creative methods approach

Abstract

Lessons learned from a creative methods approachYouth Creating Disaster Recovery & Resilience (YCDR 2 ) is a crossborder initiative aimed at learning from and with disaster-affected youth 13 to 22 years of age in Joplin, Missouri, in the United States, and Slave Lake, Calgary and High River, Alberta, in Canada.Each of these communities experienced major disasters and were in the early stages of recovery when they were selected for this study. Working with local partners in each community, YCDR 2 faculty and students engaged youth in experiential and arts-based workshops to explore their stories of recovery and resilience. The questions framing this research project focused on the people, places, spaces and activities that helped or hindered the recovery process for youth and their peers.Beyond the practical and theoretical advances of the work, which are described elsewhere Fletcher et al. 2016), the project offers a number of methodological contributions and lessons learned about community and youth engagement and processes that simultaneously highlight the capacities of youth, generate data, and provide novel options for knowledge mobilisation in disaster research and practice. This article, therefore, describes the YCDR 2 engagement and research process and elaborates on the opportunities and challenges associated with establishing youth-community-academic partnerships in postdisaster contexts. PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH WITH CHILDREN AND YOUTHThis research was grounded in a participatory orientation, and the flexible research and engagement strategy mirrors some of the concurrent data generation and analysis strategies of grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin 1997). This approach allowed us to be flexible and responsive in the emergent and shifting contexts of diverse post-disaster environments (also see Brown 2009). Furthermore, it supported our ability to adapt each research workshop to suit the unique needs and capacities of each community, the youth with whom we were working and the research team.

Adjournment in Community HIV Prevention: Exploring Transitions in Community–Academic Partnerships

“…Tuckman’s model focuses on how groups, organizations, or collectives develop, face and resolve challenges, and continue to thrive. The “forming–storming–norming–performing” stages of Tuckman’s model are most widely known and adopted (Khodyakov et al, 2009; Koch, 2007; Peek et al, 2016; Stajura et al, 2012). However, Tuckman and Jensen (1977) later added a fifth stage, “adjourning,” sometimes referred to as “mourning,” to focus on processes that affect the end of projects and the dissolution of groups.…”

Place-based loss and resilience among disaster-affected youth

“…The use of photos as tools for reflection is well‐established in qualitative research, with theoretical roots in symbolic interactionism's focus on the ways in which individuals make sense of their worlds through social interactions and interpretation (Schulze, ). Compared to standard interviews, using photos as symbols of meaning encourages deeper reflection from participants (e.g., Harper, ) and has been found to be particularly powerful for engaging disaster‐affected youth to reflect on and share their experiences (Peek et al., ).…”

April 2021

“…This age range is marked as a time of transition, where people develop independence that might include moving away from the family home, finding a partner, studying or starting a career. However, as a specific age cohort, young adults have tended to be overlooked as research participants in post-disaster research (Peek et al 2016). If included in research, their specific psychosocial recovery has not been examined .…”