Strengthening Research Through Participatory Methods

Summary

MDRC researchers employed a participatory evaluation approach — partnering with 10 young people — to better understand the experiences of youth involved in the Learn and Earn to Achieve Potential (LEAP)™ initiative.

What Is LEAP?

LEAP is a multisite initiative of the Annie E. Casey Foundation involving youth and young adults, ages 14–25, who have experienced the juvenile justice system, foster care or homelessness. The initiative aims to help these fellows build and expand their education and employment pathways.

LEAP grantees typically operate the program in multiple locations and in partnership with other organizations. These partners include the K–12 educational system, postsecondary education and training institutions, employers, workforce development organizations, child welfare and justice agencies and other local nonprofits and government entities.

These grantees operate two core models: Jobs for America’s Graduates (JAG) and Jobs For the Future’s Back on Track. JAG targets young people who have not completed high school. Back on Track helps young people transition to postsecondary education and persist through their first year of college or advanced training.

Beyond embracing these models, grantees add programming and adapt research-informed practices that can benefit the young people they serve. Such offerings include training LEAP staff in trauma-informed approaches, helping youth navigate barriers, providing leadership opportunities to the young fellows and more.

About the National LEAP Youth Fellowship

The National LEAP Youth Fellowship engages one fellow from each LEAP location for a one-year commitment. These participants inform the initiative’s youth engagement and leadership development and 10 such fellows partnered with the MDRC team to help sharpen their research on young people and their experiences with LEAP.

What MDRC and LEAP Youth Fellows Accomplished Together

During seven virtual meetings, the Fellows met with MDRC to develop guides for interviews with LEAP participants, interpret a specific portion of the interview data, generate lessons for the program going forward and suggest the best ways to present their collaborative findings. Along the way, the Fellows learned research and interview skills — a secondary goal of the initiative.

The resulting report explores:

• how collaboration benefited the research process;
• strategies that the researchers used to structure the collaboration;
• what challenges the researchers encountered; and
• advice for incorporating participatory methods into other research efforts.

What Is Participatory Research?

Participatory research is rooted in the idea that the people most affected by the research underway should be partners in designing it and carrying it out. These approaches focus on topics that are meaningful to the affected individuals and on research that is carried out in ways that are sensitive to their experiences. Intentionally engaging affected groups in the research process can lead to new insights about the topics being studied.

Below are three key principles behind the approach:

1. People do not need advanced degrees to conduct research. Everyone can bring valuable insights to all parts of the research process, from designing the research to interpreting and sharing the findings.
2. Those who are closest to a problem generally know the most about it. People’s subjective and lived experiences bring valuable insights and contributions to the research process; these perspectives are as valuable as the "objective" viewpoint of outsiders.
3. Including a broad range of perspectives will produce better, more accurate insights. Bringing together people with lived experience, community members and researchers provides opportunities to collect data in ways that are culturally responsive and to interpret the data from many perspectives, making them less subject to the biases of a single perspective.