582 Research with Adolescent Migrants: Ethical Complexities, Agency, and the Power of Community

Abstract OP 36: Challenges and Opportunities for Health 2, B207 (FCSH), September 5, 2025, 10:15 - 11:15 Background Late adolescence includes self-discovery and continued emotional, cognitive and physiologic development. For millions of teens, this life stage transpires during irregular migration, where they confront unexpected opportunities, negotiate agency, and transect boundaries. Both unaccompanied and accompanied adolescent migrants navigate unsettling uncertainty during transit/ temporary resettlement, often expressing resilience through interactions with other migrants, age-peers, or post-hoc family-like units. Researchers working with adolescent migrants face ethical and logistical complexities that benefit from community collaboration. Objective to explore how community partnerships facilitate and inform research with adolescent migrants through formal and informal co-creation. Methods We draw on 3 examples of research with adolescent migrants carried out in partnership with service providers, shelters, and migrant youth organizations in three different global regions to highlighting the unique complexities of migrant youth research based in community settings. Results Key themes that emerged from our combined work include challenges surrounding: consent and assent; institutional policies on working with ‘minors’; selection of teen-friendly approaches, language, and assessment settings and structures to accommodate the heterogeneity within adolescence; societal othering/ xenophobia; and intricacies of including siblings within studies. Youth transiting through Mexico demonstrate engaging in practices of solidarity in transient communities defined by shared experiences. An adult-centric view on the part of service providers, IRBs and researchers may obscure adolescents’ agency. In Türkiye, participatory-based research with forcibly displaced adolescents supports outreach, co-design of health initiatives, and youth empowerment, especially when local youth are included. In resettlement contexts in the US, embedding health research within legal service provision settings facilitates access and enriches results but also implies balancing competing priorities, and trust building across disciplines. Conclusion Health-related research with migrant or refugee adolescents, whether emancipated, ‘disconnected’, or residing within family units is uniquely informed and challenged when carried out in partnership with community based providers.