Empowering Youth Voices: Reflections on Designing and Facilitating Youth-Engaged Online Research Studies


Kara Brisson-Boivin, MediaSmarts/Carleton University; Khadija Baig, MediaSmarts/Carleton University

At MediaSmarts, Canadas non-profit centre for digital media literacy, we position youth as experts in their own lives and design research studies that create safe spaces for them to share their experiences and strategies related to the internet and digital technology. For over 25 years, MediaSmarts has been conducting mixed-methods (qualitative and quantitative) research studies with and for Canadian youth to counter adultism and centre the online lives and experiences of participants. Recent qualitative projects, in particular, have allowed us to meaningfully engage with young people regarding their attitudes, behaviours, and concerns about the online information ecosystem through creative and interactive online focus groups. In this presentation, we will share reflections and lessons learned from our experience designing and conducting digital sociology studies with Canadian youth. For instance, at MediaSmarts we believe that meaningful research with youth necessarily blurs the lines between pedagogy, methodology, and advocacy. However, this is not at the cost of ethical research or prefiguring desired outcomes through the research process. We design our research projects to ensure engagement with youth from the start to the end of a project – to empower youth and provide them with knowledge and skills that they can take with them as they continue to navigate the online world and digital technology. However, youth-led research, especially in the online context, presents unique methodological and ethical challenges including: the need to remain flexible, the ability to adapt recruitment strategies, data collection, and methodologies, as well as difficulties in presenting new and/or unique research approaches to research ethics boards. We will ground this discussion in our recent qualitative project: Reporting Platforms: Young Canadians Evaluate Efforts to Counter Disinformation [1] in which we facilitated interactive online focus groups with youth ages 16 to 29 to examine and assess reporting processes on popular apps (Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube). This research highlights how young Canadians feel about current efforts to counter misinformation and disinformation online and what solutions they have regarding the problems and concerns they experience while navigating online information ecosystems and communities. Participants developed both platform-specific and general recommendations for countering mis-and dis-information which we mobilize with other researchers, policy-and decision-makers, and educators. Finally, we will discuss the benefits of merging methodology with pedagogy and share promising practices for designing and facilitating youth-engaged online research studies that position youth as experts within the field of digital sociology.

This paper will be presented at the following session: