Poster #61 - Involving young people in health research: A Delphi study

• In Event: Poster Session 18

Abstract

Background: Less than 1% of studies on child and adolescent health report the involvement of young people (Sellars et al., 2019). The under-involvement of young people in health research has been attributed to the challenges experienced by researchers in collaborating with youth (Sellars et al., 2019; Wilson et al., 2020). To enhance meaningful youth involvement in health research, there is a need for an in-depth understanding of the strategies used to address the challenges associated with youth involvement and the best practices for involving youth in health research. However, through conducting an umbrella review of reviews on youth involvement in research, we found out that while numerous challenges of youth engagement are reported in the literature, very few mitigation strategies are reported to address these challenges, and the reported best practices of youth involvement are not operationalized for use. To address these gaps, this Delphi study aims to establish expert consensus on the operationalization of best practices in working with young people and the recommendations to address the identified challenges in involving young people.
Methods: The Delphi study will be conducted with 90 participants, including researchers with expertise in collaborating with young people in health research and young people (aged 10-24 years) who have experience in contributing to health research projects as advisors or collaborators. We will invite participants from low, middle, and high-income countries to ensure the findings are applicable in different contexts. In the first round, participants will take part in an in-depth interview where they will share recommendations or potential mitigation strategies to address the challenges of youth involvement that researchers and young people face in health research projects. Participants will also be presented with the best practices highlighted in the literature and will be invited to share their opinion on how to operationalize these practices in different contexts with different populations. The data from these interviews will be analyzed using content analysis.
In the second and third rounds, participants will rate the degree to which they agree with each of the presented best practices of youth involvement and recommendations for each challenge. The results will be used to rank the best practices of youth involvement in health research and mitigation strategies to address challenges of youth engagement based on percentage agreement. Adolescent co-researchers will be involved in multiple steps of the Delphi study, including protocol development, conducting interviews, data analysis, write-up, and dissemination. Through working with researchers and young people, we will develop a comprehensive list of the best practices in collaborating with young people and the recommendations to address challenges to meaningful youth involvement.
Implications for practice: The findings of this Delphi study will inform the development of an updated set of guidelines for involving young people in health research. These guidelines will help researchers ensure meaningful youth involvement by addressing the commonly experienced challenges in youth involvement. This will lead to an increase in meaningful youth involvement in research studies, potentially leading to improved quality of research and better outcomes for the young people involved.

Authors

• Azza Warraitch, Trinity College Dublin
  Presenting Author

• Delali Bruce, Trinity Centre for Global Health, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.

• Kristin Hadfield, Trinity College Dublin