We provide an overview of diverse forms of youth participation, with a focus on youth participatory action research (YPAR) and its synergies with life course intervention research to promote healthier development for young people and across the life span. We analyze why YPAR matters for research, practice, and policies related to the systems and settings in which young people develop. We also illustrate how young people perform YPAR work to improve the developmental responsiveness and equity of school and health systems, including descriptions of an innovative youth-led health center in Rwanda and a long-standing and evolving integration of YPAR into public high schools in the United States.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCommunity partnerships are vital for the co-production, implementation, and dissemination of practice- and policy-relevant research to advance public psychology. Particularly in "Research 1" universities, the institutional infrastructure, culture, and criteria for faculty advancement are often a mismatch for impactful community-partnered research. Past and current efforts by psychologists and others at the University of California (UC) seek to promote partnerships, infrastructure, and practices for faculty development and advancement that align excellence and impact in scholarship with advancing the public mission of the UC and its campuses.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: This study investigated the prevalence of technology-use rules, typical sleep habits, and associations between rules and sleep using the representative 2017-2018 California Health Interview Survey adolescent sample.
Methods: Adolescents aged 12-17 years completed the California Health Interview Survey, including queries of (1) rules at home regarding times to turn off or put away electronics and (2) school-night bedtime and rise time. Rates of rules and associations between rules and sleep were investigated using descriptive statistics and bivariate and multivariable analyses.
The prevalence and impact of child maltreatment make the scientific investigation of this phenomenon a matter of vital importance. Prior research has examined associations between problematic patterns of parents' emotion reactivity and regulation and child maltreatment and maltreatment risk. However, the strength and specificity of these relationships is not yet clear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
April 2021
Background: A multitude of empirical evidence documents links between education and health, but this focuses primarily on educational attainment and not on characteristics of the school setting. Little is known about the extent to which aggregate characteristics of the school setting, such as student body demographics, are associated with adult health outcomes.
Methods: We use the U.
There is an array of youth participatory approaches relevant to health equity efforts in community psychology, adolescent health, youth development, and education. While they share some commonalities, they also reflect important distinctions regarding key processes and intended level of impact. Here, we consider the following: (a) youth-led participatory action research (YPAR), (b) youth organizing (YO), (c) youth-led planning, (d) human-centered design, (e) participatory arts, and (f) youth advisory boards.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Rapid advances in technology create opportunities for adolescents to influence practice and policy in health and other domains. Technology can support the scaling of Youth-Led Participatory Action Research (YPAR), in which adolescents conduct research to improve issues that affect them. We present the first known published systematic review of the use of technology to scale YPAR.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFYouth-Led Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is a social justice-focused approach for promoting social change and positive youth development in which youth conduct systematic research and actions to improve their schools and communities. Although YPAR is oriented to generating research for action, with evidence-based recommendations often aimed at influencing adults with power over settings and systems that shape youths' lives, we have little understanding of how YPAR evidence influences the thinking and/or actions of adult policymakers or practitioners. In general, the participatory research field lacks a theoretically informed "use of research evidence" lens, while the use of evidence field lacks consideration of the special case and implications of participatory research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdolescent sleep deprivation is a pressing public health issue in the United States as well as other countries. The contexts of adolescents' lives are changing rapidly, but little is known about the factors that adolescents themselves believe affect their sleep. This study uses a social-ecological framework to investigate multiple levels of perceived influence on sleep patterns of urban adolescents.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
November 2019
Trans women face numerous structural barriers to health due to discrimination. Housing instability is an important structural determinant of poor health outcomes among trans women. The purpose of this study was to determine if experiences of intersectional anti-trans and racial discrimination are associated with poor housing outcomes among trans women in the San Francisco Bay Area.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe many adverse effects of child maltreatment make the scientific investigation of this phenomenon a matter of vital importance. Although the relationship between maltreatment and problematic emotion reactivity and regulation has been studied, the strength and specificity of these associations are not yet clear. We examine the magnitude of the maltreatment-child-emotion reactivity/regulation link.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Community Psychol
September 2019
Young people of color residing in distressed urban contexts face challenges in accessing social capital that supports positive development and the transition to educational and employment opportunities. Youth-serving organizations play potentially important roles for youth participants to access and leverage networks. This ethnographic study draws on qualitative interviews, conducted with adolescents at a youth-serving organization based in East Oakland, California, to examine how network-based social capital is activated and sustained for and by urban Black and Latinx youth.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Emotional maltreatment is the most pervasive but least studied form of abuse.
Objective: In the present study, we examined the role of emotion reactivity and emotion regulation in emotional child maltreatment.
Methods: We identified nine studies that compared levels of parental emotion reactivity and regulation in emotionally maltreating families with levels in non-maltreating families.
Most adolescents face numerous obstacles to good sleep, which may undermine healthy development. In this study, we used latent class analysis and identified four categories of sleep barriers in a diverse sample of 553 urban youth (57% female). The majority profile, School/Screens Barriers, reported the most homework and extracurricular barriers, along with high screen time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
December 2017
Parenting may be influenced by ethnicity; marginalization; education; and poverty. A critical but unexamined question is how these factors may interact to compromise or support parenting practices in ethnic minority communities. This analysis examined associations between mothers' stimulating parenting practices and a range of child-level (age; sex; and cognitive and socio-emotional development); household-level (indigenous ethnicity; poverty; and parental education); and community-level (economic marginalization and majority indigenous population) variables among 1893 children ages 4-18 months in poor; rural communities in Mexico.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
December 2017
Over 50% of mothers in rural Mexico have high depressive symptoms, and their children's health and development are likely to be negatively affected. A critical question is whether children vary in their vulnerability to the effects of high maternal depressive symptoms according to their indigenous ethnicity, maternal education, or household wealth. Our sample included 4442 mothers and 5503 children from an evaluation of Mexico's social welfare program.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The prevalence of obesity among Latino children is alarmingly high, when compared to non-Latino White children. Low-income Latino parents living in urban areas, even if they are well-educated, face obstacles that shape familial health behaviors. This study used qualitative methods to explore parents' experiences in providing meals and opportunities to play to their children aged 2 to 5 years.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFemale Sex Workers are a core population in the HIV epidemic, and interventions such as conditional cash transfers (CCTs), effective in other health domains, are a promising new approach to reduce the spread of HIV. Here we investigate how a population of Tanzanian female sex workers, though constrained in many ways, experience and use their power in the context of a CCT intervention that incentivizes safe sex. We analyzed 20 qualitative in-depth interviews with female sex workers enrolled in a randomized-controlled CCT program, the RESPECT II pilot, and found that while such women have limited choices, they do have substantial power over their work logistics that they leveraged to meet the conditions of the CCT and receive the cash award.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article describes the implementation process of a nationwide project to enhance young people's participation and active citizenship in the context of Portugal's economic recession. This project used an innovative Positive Youth Development approach that engaged Portuguese youth (aged 11-18 years) through social media tools to facilitate their civic engagement and development. Participants from all over the country were empowered (1) to design and conduct research activities on topics of their choice and about their life contexts and (2) to create ways to improve youth civic participation in their communities, while developing supportive interactions with adults and peers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Community Psychol
June 2016
The exploration of social networking sites (SNS) in promoting social change efforts offers great potential within the field of community psychology. Online communities on SNS provide opportunities for bridging across groups, thus fostering the exchange of novel ideas and practices. Currently, there have only been limited efforts to examine SNS within the context of youth-led efforts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdv Child Dev Behav
July 2016
Youth-led participatory action research (YPAR) is an approach to scientific inquiry and social change grounded in principles of equity that engages young people in identifying problems relevant to their own lives, conducting research to understand the problems, and advocating for changes based on research evidence. This chapter provides an introduction to YPAR followed by consideration of the (a) developmental relevance of YPAR for marginalized youth, (b) implications of YPAR for developmental science research on inequities experienced by youth, and (c) potential opportunities and impact of YPAR for improving key developmental settings such as schools and youth-serving organizations. Resources for conducting YPAR projects are discussed, as well as the need for potential integration of YPAR and other participatory approaches to engaging youth and their expertise-at a significant enough scale to have a meaningful impact on policies and practices that affect youth development.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAfghanistan and Iraq veterans experienced traumas during deployment, and disrupted connections with friends and family. In this context, it is critical to understand the nature of veterans' transition to civilian life, the challenges navigated, and approaches to reconnection. We investigated these issues in a qualitative study, framed by homecoming theory, that comprised in-depth interviews with 24 veterans.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis review provides a comprehensive investigation of the pattern and strength of findings in the literature regarding the environmental moderators of the relationship between exposure to community violence and mental health among children and adolescents. Twenty-nine studies met criteria for inclusion in our analysis of family, school, and community variables as moderators. Dependent variables included internalizing (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHow are social interaction dynamics associated with mental health during early stages of adolescence? The goal of this study is to objectively measure social interactions and evaluate the roles that multiple aspects of the social environment--such as physical activity and food choice--may jointly play in shaping the structure of children's relationships and their mental health. The data in this study are drawn from a longitudinal network-behavior study conducted in 2012 at a private K-8 school in an urban setting in California. We recruited a highly complete network sample of sixth-graders (n = 40, 91% of grade, mean age = 12.
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