Emily J. Ozer

While youth participatory action research (YPAR), a youth‐adult partnered or youth‐led approach to knowledge generation and social change, has burgeoned over the last decade, challenges remain related to capacity for its implementation. Yet, the field lacks a YPAR implementation capacity framework. Here, we created a YPAR implementation capacity framework by adapting a key domain (innovation‐specific capacity) of a foundational organizational readiness framework that had previously been applied to YPAR conceptually but not empirically. Using literature from a systematic review of YPAR articles reporting youth and environmental outcomes (2015–2022, N = 53), we inductively formed four YPAR implementation capacity domains: (1) resources; (2) training, preparation, and support; (3) relationships within and across systems; (4) characteristics of the YPAR team. We also identified facilitators and barriers of YPAR implementation capacity that we categorized into subdomains. We modified the original innovation‐specific capacity construct based on the domains we identified in the literature to begin to create a YPAR implementation capacity framework, intended to set the stage for continued theory building and planning for YPAR.

Background: The Use of Research Evidence (URE) and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) fields have developed in parallel. YPAR grapples with challenges of timeliness, ‘traction’, and sustained impact: Where does YPAR evidence go, who hears it, and what happens after youth present their findings? URE frameworks developed primarily with professional research in mind, leaving unexamined the use of evidence generated by students within the systems youth seek to change. Position: Cross-pollination of YPAR and URE strengthens both fields and requires intentionality. URE concepts such as absorptive capacity and brokering illuminate pathways and barriers to YPAR impact, yet must center internal knowledge generated by youth, address power dynamics, and resist reducing YPAR to a transmission model of evidence delivery. Arguments: Drawing on our UC-Berkeley-SFUSD Research-Practice Partnership focused on promoting student engagement and reducing chronic absenteeism, we examine how URE concepts sharpened our questions about organizational learning and decision-making. Districts must expand absorptive capacity to include YPAR as legitimate internal knowledge. Brokering must account for power differentials when youth critique the institutions that serve them. Political and symbolic uses of YPAR risk tokenizing youth input when decision-makers fail to act – or act in ways that contradict youth goals. Implications: Advancing authentic YPAR integration into system routines requires strategic advance planning, structures connecting evidence to decision-makers, and intentional space for multiple interest holders to shape questions and actions. We call for large-scale empirical investigation of YPAR URE, comparative designs to assess the value-add of YPAR, and systems mapping to clarify pathways to impact.

Background: To address research–practice gaps, scholars are investigating the conditions that strengthen and constrain the use of research evidence. Yet these studies primarily focus on evidence that adult researchers have generated. In Youth-Led Participatory Action Research (YPAR), youth learn to conduct systematic research to improve their schools and communities. However, youth researchers face challenges similar to those experienced by adult researchers around how their findings are disseminated and used. Methods: This article illustrates active efforts of a research–practice partnership between San Francisco Unified School District and UC Berkeley to scale the impact and use of YPAR evidence. We detail the development and testing of a districtwide dashboard as a method for disseminating YPAR evidence to K-12 students and district leaders. We describe the origins and motivation for the dashboard concept, the development process, early impact and benefits, implementation challenges, and future directions. Findings: Through the development and testing of the dashboard, ethical and political implications emerged. We describe tensions related to dashboard content, privacy and confidentiality, use, and impact. Conclusion: The dashboard is one method designed to strengthen the use and impact of youth-generated evidence from YPAR. Implementation challenges that arose during the development phase required us to strategise about responsibly and effectively disseminating YPAR evidence. As of December 2025, we have moved into a beta testing phase for the dashboard. A forthcoming public launch will bring new insights to district leaders in San Francisco, with potential replication across the state and beyond.

Community-engaged scholarship, research conducted in partnership with diverse communities outside of academia, is one way that universities can fulfill their public mission to society. Unfortunately, academic institutions are not always well-suited to support this kind of research, leading to recent attention on how universities can strengthen organizational conditions for community-engaged scholarship. Within such efforts, resource allocation plays an important role in creating the needed structures and systems to facilitate community-engaged scholarship. However, effective resource allocation is complex. To advance understandings of strategic resource allocation for community-engaged scholarship, this paper features illustrative cases of three public research universities, identifying and analyzing diverse resource allocation approaches, and employing the theoretical framework of organizational readiness. These examples include both internal and external funding, and span a range of focal areas, such as infrastructure, implementation, and convening. We further draw upon these cases to generate a tool to guide institutional leaders and funders in assessing their approaches to resource allocation. Through illustrating a variety of approaches to strategic resource allocation, we aim to showcase new directions in the academic ecosystem to better support community-engaged scholarship.

In this review, we provide a conceptual and empirical overview of youth-led participatory action research (YPAR) across disciplines. We consider the historical and conceptual contexts for the diversity of YPAR approaches and ( a ) the rationales underlying the rapid growth of YPAR in practice and research; ( b ) the relevance of YPAR for the study and promotion of healthy and equitable human development; ( c ) the state of the empirical evidence for YPAR impact on youth and environments, especially domains of social-emotional well-being and sociopolitical development; ( d ) challenges and opportunities at the intersection of YPAR and developmental science; and ( e ) important next steps for the field, including the further development of multimethod research and the need for stronger research and practice to support the capacities needed for YPAR integrity, impact, and sustainability.

Young people need opportunities that support their well-being while enabling them to take meaningful action. There has been strong interest in youth participatory action research (YPAR) as a form of sociopolitical action for marginalized youth seeking to address inequities that undermine individual and community well-being. The rapid growth of the YPAR literature in the last decade has involved studies analyzing the impact of YPAR on dimensions of youth empowerment, sociopolitical development (SPD), and well-being. The relatively new framework of Transformative Social Emotional Learning (tSEL) is potentially fruitful in identifying relevant constructs, skills, and strategies to support well-being during the YPAR process. This article seeks to advance our integrative conceptualization and analysis of the impact of YPAR by (1) considering the overlapping and unique dimensions of SPD and tSEL: agency, belonging, collaborative problem solving, curiosity, identity, societal involvement, and worldview and social analysis; and (2) applying this integrative lens to the analysis of novel data from an updated systematic review of U.S. and international YPAR studies (2015–2022). We summarize youth outcomes reported in 25 studies to assess the evidence for YPAR as an approach for promoting youth SPD and tSEL outcomes, identifying limitations and next steps for advancing our understanding of these impacts.

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. We then briefly consider the adult capacities needed to do this work well, given that YPAR challenges typical youth-adult power relationships and broader assumptions about who can generate expert knowledge. We consider the alignment and potential challenges for integration of life course intervention research as well as YPAR and next steps for research and practice at this intersection.

Community 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. Here, we delineate "partnered" public scholarship and provide an overview of mismatch between this scholarship and university structures. We then describe unique features of the UC and three cases of interdisciplinary partnerships to advance educational equity that illustrate how distinctive campuses and units engaged resources, deployed diverse strategies, and succeeded as well as failed to address challenges related to (a) how partnered scholarship is enacted, (b) supports to sustain the initiatives, and (c) faculty evaluation. We then consider lessons learned, implications, and ethical issues related to public psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

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.S. nationally representative National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort to statistically assess the association between two different measures of high school student composition (socioeconomic composition, racial/ethnic composition) and two different health outcomes at age 40 (self-rated health and obesity). Results: After adjusting for confounders, high school socioeconomic composition, but not racial/ethnic composition, was weakly associated with both obesity and worse self-rated health at age 40. However, after adding adult educational attainment to the model, only the association between high school socioeconomic composition and obesity remained statistically significant. Conclusions: Future research should explore possible mechanisms and also if findings are similar across other populations and in other school contexts. These results suggest that education policies that seek to break the link between socioeconomic composition and negative outcomes remain important but may have few spillover effects onto health.