Poster #105 - Qualitative analysis of youth’s perception of their worlds: Identifying challenges and sources of support

• In Event: Poster Session 13

Abstract

Introduction: Early experiences, and the broader socio-ecological contexts in which they are embedded, shape how youth perceive, interpret, and act upon their worlds. Emerging adolescents in today’s U.S. society have been forced to contend with a worldwide pandemic, social unrest, climate change–all while negotiating the massive socio-biological changes that typify this developmental span. A more nuanced qualitative understanding of the ways in which youth navigate these challenges is of critical importance for identifying sources of resilience in these youths’ lives in ways that overcome the constraints of non-qualitative measures. In this pre-registered exploratory study, we draw from recent innovations in qualitative data analysis to illuminate key themes derived from open-ended responses assessing youth’s current perceptions of their worlds.

Methods: Data come from a sample of 56 12– to 15-year-olds (51.8% female, 94.6% White, 19.6% Asian, 3.6% Hispanic, 1.8% Other) living in a metropolitan city in the Midwest with an average household income-to-needs ratio of 6.1 (sd = 3.5). Participants completed a computerized learning task and completed questionnaires. As part of the study protocol, youth were also asked to respond to two open-ended reflection questions which we use in the current study. The first prompt replicates that presented in Roy et al. (2019), which asks youth to reflect on how the world could be better and write a few sentences about problems that matter to them and why. The second prompt, created for this study, asked youth to reflect and share the ways their own lived experiences (both positive and negative) have shaped the way they learn, think, and behave. There were no word limits on responses.

Planned analyses and hypotheses: We will apply a new approach to qualitative analyses–structural topic modeling (STM; Roberts et al., 2019)–to identify the most commonly occurring themes in youth’s open-ended responses and explore whether themes vary across socio demographic groups. Broadly, this data-driven approach identifies clusters of co-occurring words, or latent topics and their relation to metadata (e.g., demographics). We will use the stm R package (Roberts et al., 2019) and contemporary ‘best practices’ (e.g., Weston et al., in press) to guide model fitting and compare candidate models that vary in the number of identified topics. Additional iterative steps will be conducted to organize, interpret, and label topic content. Given the relatively small sample size but moderately specific question prompts, we anticipate finding a small to moderate number of dominant themes (i.e., between 4-10). We further anticipate that our derived topic themes will reflect salient issues adolescents are exposed to in today’s U.S. society such as COVID-19, violence, climate change, and mental health or interpersonal challenges. Themes emerging from the second prompt are exploratory and will be used to inform further research.

Conclusion: The anticipated findings from this qualitative study will highlight the nuanced ways today’s adolescent youth reflect on their worlds and how they navigate within it. Their voices and perspectives will generate new insights for further research examining relations between lived experience and youth development.

Authors

• Meghan G Harwell, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
  Presenting Author

• Meriah L. DeJoseph, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Sarah Grace Kuplic

• Willem E Frankenhuis

• Daniel Berry, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities