Navigating the Institutional Review Board and other institutional entities: An ode to aspiring YPAR scholars.

Youth-led participatory action research (YPAR) engages young people as partners in rigorous research inquiry to guide and inform collective action. Scholars interested in YPAR have notable investment in social justice and activist values, which at times come in direct tensions within their doctoral training and/or professional roles within academia. One monumental hurdle in conducting YPAR is obtaining approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB).

Trajectories of sociopolitical stress during the 2020 United States presidential election season: Associations with psychological well-being, civic action, and social identities.

Sociopolitical stress arises in reaction to awareness of, exposure to, and/or involvement in political events. Among a longitudinal cohort of 628 college students from 10 universities across the U.S.

Spotlighting racism in schools: Teacher mentors and the mediating effect of school safety.

Youth are more likely to succeed when they feel safe at school and have access to caring relationships with adults. Systemic racism interrupts access to these assets. Within schools, racially/ethnically minoritized youth encounter policies rooted in racism, leading to decreased perceptions of school safety.

Validation of the Black Community Activism Orientation Scale with racially and ethnically diverse college students.

This study fills a methodological gap in racial justice research by assessing the utility and validity of the Black Community Activism Orientation Scale (BCAOS) in a racially and ethnically diverse sample of college-going young adults (N = 624, M = 19.4 years, SD = 1.89) from 10 colleges in the United States.

Election-related sociopolitical stress and coping among college students in the United States.

The present study examines sociopolitical stress, coping, and well-being among college students. Young adult college students (N = 588; ages 18-29; 72% cisgender women) from 10 universities in the USA participated in this study. Participants completed a 45-minute online survey with closed-ended and open-ended questions, administered via Qualtrics.

Exploring housing insecurity in relation to student success.

Objectives: The relative high rates of homelessness and housing insecurity among college students has become a public health concern within the U.S. This study explores the relationship between housing instability in relation to academic and mental health outcomes.

Identifying protective socio-ecological factors for college students in California's deadliest wildfire.

This case study examined multi-level social-ecological supports in promoting well-being through college students impacted by one of the deadliest wildfires in U.S. history.

Exploring civic behaviors amongst college students in a year of national unrest.

This study examined the role of demographics, civic beliefs, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in association with distinct forms of civic participation. College students were recruited across 10 institutions of higher education to complete an online survey. Bivariate, multivariable linear, and logistic regressions were performed.

Leveraging research to inform prevention and intervention efforts: Identifying risk and protective factors for rural and urban homeless families within transitional housing programs.

This mixed method study spotlights hardships and supportive factors for unhoused families led by single mothers who have successfully graduated from two transitional housing programs, one rural and one urban. Data collection consisted of entry and exit surveys (n = 241) as well as qualitative interviews (n = 11). Binary logistic regression results indicated education and social support as significant predictors of successful program completion.

Examining Disparities in Food Access Between Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Non-Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Purpose: Examine if Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are more likely to be located in low food access area (LFA) census tracts compared to public non-HBCUs.

Design: ArcGIS Pro was utilized to capture food environments and census tract sociodemographic data.

Setting: The sample included 98 HBCUs and 777 public non-HBCUs within the United States.

Shards from the glass ceiling: Deconstructing marginalizing systems in relation to critical consciousness development.

In this qualitative case study, the authors identify, name, and critique multi-level contextual factors in relation to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color college student leaders' and the authors' own critical consciousness development applying Harrel's Difference Framework, and Critical Race Theory. Located in a Northern California Sundown Town, the authors utilize focus groups, Photovoice data, and critical ethnography to document organizational and institutional responses towards student leaders' and the authors' involvement in multicultural programming and a Black Lives Matter Freedom School. Across data sources, the authors chronicle instances of the following: (1) devaluing through unpaid student labor, (2) distancing and siloing of multicultural student organizations on campus, (3) denial of the use of harmful and misinformed programmatic practices, and (4) defensiveness on the part of the administration regarding student narratives.

Chronic Mental Health Sequelae of Climate Change Extremes: A Case Study of the Deadliest Californian Wildfire.

Weather-related disasters, such as wildfires exacerbated by a rise in global temperatures, need to be better studied in terms of their mental health impacts. This study focuses on the mental health sequelae of the deadliest wildfire in California to date, the Camp Fire of 2018. We investigated a sample of 725 California residents with different degrees of disaster exposure and measured mental health using clinically validated scales for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), major depressive disorder (MDD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).

Using Technology to Scale up Youth-Led Participatory Action Research: A Systematic Review.

Purpose: 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.

Psychological and political liberation: Strategies to promote power, wellness, and liberation among anti-racist activists.

In recent years, there has been a robust racial justice movement in the United States, which has pursued power with the goal of promoting wellness and liberating people from racially and historically oppressed communities. Organizations such as Black Lives Matter and Showing Up for Racial Justice continue building power and promoting psychological and political liberation. The purpose of our study is to investigate the developmental processes by which anti-racist activists resist psychological and political oppression to approach wellness and liberation.

Exploring the associations between youths' explanations of poverty at the societal level and judgements of distributive justice.

This study explores whether adolescents' societal explanations regarding the causes of poverty are associated with distributive justice reasoning. Survey data were collected from 425 6th-12th graders who answered questions concerning the causes of poverty and a vignette depicting a hypothetical class project designed to assess the degree to which the adolescent respondent would distribute resources based on principles of need or merit. Findings indicated that adolescents who explained poverty based on structural or a mix of structural and individual causes were more likely to base decisions about resource distribution on need, whereas those who attributed poverty to individual causes distributed resources based on merit.

How Unequal Is the United States? Adolescents' Images of Social Stratification.

This study highlights the use of pictorial images to understand adolescents' views on social stratification. A continuum of five visual images of social stratification were presented to a diverse sample of five hundred ninety-eight 8th-12th graders (14-18 years old). Adolescents selected which image best represented the United States (today, in 20 years, how it ought to be).

Scaling-Up Youth-Led Social Justice Efforts through an Online School-Based Social Network.

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.

Brokering the Research-Practice Gap: A typology.

Despite widespread recognition of a research-practice gap in multiple service sectors, less is known about how pre-existing communication channels facilitate the flow of information between researchers and practitioners. In the current study, we applied an existing typology of brokerage developed by Gould and Fernandez (Sociol Methodol 19:89-126, 1989) to examine what types of brokerage facilitate information spread between researchers and educational practitioners. Specifically, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 school administrators and staff in two public school districts regarding their experiences searching for information about instructional, health, and social skills programs.