Doing Research With Young-Adult Co-Researchers

We really believe in including young people's voices in our research. We try out best to build this into our research proposals wherever possible and are constantly thinking about the best ways to engage them (e.g., using creative methods) and ensuring we aren't just applying an adult lens to the things we ask and the way we do it. So, in a project we have just completed for an external partner, we recruited two volunteer young-adult co-researchers who supported us in Phase 3 of the research.

Working alongside us for almost a year, these two co-researchers helped us to:

- Consider the best things to ask the young people to understand their views

- Think about the most useful methods to encourage engagement

- Analyse the findings

- Reflect on how the findings aligned, or not, with their own experiences as young adults who were not long ago young people in the same context

Here are a few things we learned through this process:

1. Involving the young adults in the 'behind the scenes' of research (i.e., the planning of methods, writing of questions, and analysis) brought an additional layer of richness to research

2. It was a joy to see the young adults offer out and use their gifting /skills / experience to aid our research

3. The process was mutually beneficial to us as a research team and to the young people who were able to gain experience in something new (we haven't made this up - we will include some direct reflections from them below!)

4. Having the young people willing conduct the analysis (one of them had incredible quantitative research skills!) and reflection on the process / findings (writing an incredibly powerful reflection piece) added real weight to our final report which was delivered to our commissioning partner

We also learned a great deal from the reflection piece offered by one of the co-researchers, here is a small section of it:

"Everyone’s faith journeys are different no matter their age group and for me learning

about young people's perspectives on the church has been very enticing. It’s useful to

know what needs to be changed or fixed straight from the source.

“The youth are the church of tomorrow” is a sentence I’ve heard often and slowly

grown to dislike. We are not the church of tomorrow. We are the church of today. We

need to adapt and accommodate the church for the people who need it, not only

those who lead it.

Being a part of this project also shed some light into what faith looks like to young

people in our midst and it helps us to plan for the future of our church. We made the

questions to be simple and straightforward and as a young person who does surveys

often we also made sure that it wasn’t long or complicated. We did expect a bigger

response but the response we got was in a way more helpful as it feels like it came

from the target audience.

I also reflected on these questions and I am blessed to say that my congregation and

church are doing very well in including the young people in the services as well as

giving us the space to hold events and meet together to strengthen our faith with

each other."

We are using this experience to really reflect on how we include young people / adults in our research planning process.

How might you use our experiences to consider how you might include young people in the planning of your youth ministry? How can you consult them before something happens instead of just asking for feedback afterwards? Or, maybe you have some great examples of a consultation process with young people - we'd love to hear more - do email us at research@youthscape.co.uk !