Building Research Infrastructure for Meaningful Youth Participation: A Practice-Informed Framework for Participatory Research

Background: While current frameworks present essential principles for effective youth involvement, they provide limited practical advice on how participation can be organized and maintained throughout research projects. Meaningful involvement requires not just chances for youth to engage, but also the structural, relational, and procedural conditions that allow them to have real impact.Objective: This paper intends to present a practice-based framework for developing research infrastructure that enables meaningful youth involvement and to demonstrate its use across the research process.Methods: Building upon fifteen years of hands-on experience in youth engagement at Jimmy’s, we adapt a practice-based ecosystem-based model into a framework for participatory research, guided by equity principles and Lundy’s child participation model. The Youth Resilience Groningen study acts as a practical example to demonstrate how this framework can guide the organization of youth engagement, encompassing the formation of partnerships, defined roles, resources, facilitation, co-design, and decision-making processes.Results: The framework places equity as its main guiding principle and outlines four interrelated pillars: the research organization, researchers and research personnel, emerging research collaborators, and the broader network of community and research allies. These pillars are formed through three parallel processes: Doing, Learning, and Organising. In the Youth Resilience Groningen study, six teens were hired as junior researchers, aided by Jimmy’s, and participated in determining research priorities, creating study materials, developing questionnaires, planning recruitment strategies, and developing educational guest lectures for secondary school classes, delivered as a token of appreciation for their participation in the study. The study demonstrates how organizational structures and continuous support can enable youth participation while addressing ethical, methodological, and institutional limitations.Conclusion: Effective youth engagement goes beyond just including young individuals in research efforts. It relies on an ecosystem that allows their insights and viewpoints to guide research choices. The practice-based framework provides flexible direction for structuring, overseeing, and enhancing meaningful youth participation in research projects.