Valuing adaptive programming: A study of resilience processes and outcomes.

Recent decades have seen a growth in theoretical frameworks focusing on systems, context and the dynamic interplay of multiple variables, stimulating interest in complementary research and programme evaluation methods. With resilience theory now emphasising the complex and dynamic nature of resilience capacities, processes and outcomes, resilience programming stands to benefit from approaches such as design-based research and realist research/evaluation. The aim of this collaborative (researcher/practitioner) study was to explore how such benefits can be achieved when programme theory spans individual, community and institutional outcomes, with a focus on the reciprocal processes involved in effecting change across the social system. The context of the research was a regional (Middle East and North Africa) project operating in contexts with an escalated risk of marginalised young people being drawn into illegal/harmful activity. The project's youth engagement and development approach combined participatory learning, skills training, and collective social action, adapted for diverse localities and during the COVID-19 crisis. Quantitative measures of individual and collective resilience were at the centre of a set of realist analyses evidencing systemic connections in changes to individual, collective and community resilience. Findings demonstrated the value, challenges and limitations of the applied research approach for adaptive, contextualised programming.

Novel Application of Dot Survey Methodology at a Youth Health Clinic: A Pilot Study.

PURPOSE: We tested a novel dot survey methodology at our clinic that provides sexual health services to youth ages 13 to 24. We conducted two interactive dot surveys to assess their feasibility and acceptability while gaining insight into patients' attitudes about mental health. METHODS: We adapted a dot survey approach to assess youths' familiarity with mental health and attitudes toward related services. We also assessed their attitudes toward participating in this survey method. All patients with scheduled appointments were eligible to participate. Participants used dot stickers to indicate their responses on survey posters displayed in the waiting room. RESULTS: Three hundred patients participated between June and September 2021 (150 participants/survey). About 95% of participants liked seeing others' responses to the dot surveys, and over 70% reported that the surveys made them think more about mental health. Over 90% would participate in future dot surveys at the clinic. Survey items with the most consensus among participants included that 74.5% "really agree" youth face barriers to accessing mental health services (n = 141, mean = 4.61, standard deviation = 0.79) and 87.1% "really agree" primary care providers should ask youth about their mental health (n = 139, mean = 4.81, standard deviation = 0.59). DISCUSSION: The dot surveys were effective at assessing patients' attitudes about mental health and feasible to conduct in our waiting room. Results confirmed that this survey method was well received among patients. Dot surveys can be adapted by other clinical settings to engage youth regarding their health-related attitudes.

Enhanced-youth transition planning: An innovative practice change with transition-age youth involved with child welfare in a rural setting

This article presents Enhanced-Youth Transition Planning (E-YTP), an innovative child welfare workforce practice change for transition-age youth (TAY) involved with child welfare services from five rural jurisdictions in the State of Maryland. We describe the practice change from services as usual for TAY, including training and coaching needs for the child welfare workforce. This study presents quantitative and qualitative data assessing the impact of the E-YTP practice change on the workforce. A total of 36 supervisors and foster care workers participated in the study. The Professional Quality of Life and Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Services Survey were given to the workforce at four time over a four year period. Findings suggest an increase in burnout and secondary traumatic stress (for the PQL) and an increase in emotional exhaustion and personal accomplishment (for the MBI-HS). Focus group and interview findings suggest that the workforce endorses E-YTP. The workforce felt that the practice change made their work with TAY feel more meaningful, was a necessary practice change for TAY, and that E-YTP worked well in preparing youth for a successful exit from child welfare. We discuss implications for workforce practice changes with TAY in a rural setting, adaptations for the COVID-19 pandemic, and the need for ongoing supervision and coaching for the workforce. © 2023

Engaging Youth and Young Adults in the COVID-19 Pandemic Response via the "It's Our Turn" Crowdsourcing Contest.

As the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic continued to progress into 2021, appeals were made to take a stronger focus on the perceptions and practices of youth and young adults (YYAs) regarding COVID-19 mitigation, as well as the impact of mitigation strategies on the overall wellbeing of YYAs. In this paper, we describe our efforts to increase YYA engagement in Arizona's COVID-19 response by pairing embedded values from youth participatory action research (YPAR) with a crowdsourcing challenge contest design. The research protocol and implementation are described, followed by a thematic analysis of YYA-led messaging portrayed in 23 contest submissions and reflections formed by 223 community voters after viewing contest submissions. The authors conclude that a YYA-led crowdsourcing contest presented an opportunity to (a.) investigate the perceptions and behaviors of YYAs and their networks regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and mitigation efforts and (b.) amplify the voices of YYAs in the pandemic response. Perhaps even more importantly, this approach also offered insight into the exacerbated impact of the pandemic on YYA mental health and wellbeing, and the utility of YPAR in raising awareness of these effects among the contexts and social networks of YYAs.

Youth engagement to achieve health equity: Are healthcare organizations and leaders prepared?

Youth engagement in institutional decision-making is necessary to ensure policy and practice is responsive and relevant to youth and community needs. In particular, it is critical to engage the voices and experiences of youth of Color who have historically been marginalized by healthcare organizations. The present study used multiple methods to examine youth and adult perspectives on the facilitators and barriers to implementing a citywide youth advisory board of youths of Color for a safety net hospital. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings illustrate the need to employ an antiracist framework to ensure organizational and adult readiness to engage youth of Color in an advisory board. Organizational readiness included assessing organizational culture, clear expectation setting, and creating safe spaces for youth. Adult readiness included adult facilitators who are trained in antiracist and equity-focused practice and the youth-adult partnership model, and a recognition of the bidirectional benefits of youth engagement in decision-making. The implications and recommendations of this study are timely given the historical mistrust between healthcare organizations and communities of Color, as well as the racial health inequities that have been further exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Interactive, Artistic, Fun, and Weird: Exploring Facilitators and Challenges to Youth Engagement across In-Person, Virtual, and Hybrid Pregnancy Prevention Programs

Although U.S. adolescent birth rates in general have declined in recent decades, they continue to be a primary public health concern due to notable disparities among adolescent birth rates. In response, pregnancy prevention program development has increasingly focused on understanding how to better serve the needs of adolescents in underserved populations. To inform future program development and implementation efforts, this qualitative study explored which attributes of programs facilitated and hindered youth engagement. We collected data from educators (N = 43) and a subset of youth program participants (N = 249) from programs implemented by 14 organizations in different community-based settings. We used three data collection methods: (1) post-session surveys completed by educators, (2) post-program implementation interviews with educators, and (3) individual and focus group interviews with youth participants. Qualitative analyses revealed that educators who skillfully facilitated interactive activities and safe and inclusive learning environments promoted engagement. Feeling uncomfortable and awkward during program activities, learning in mixed-gender settings, and COVID-19 disruptions hindered engagement. Additionally, we found that youth participants had conflicting views on learning about sexual relationships at churches. Participants and educators had conflicting views on the benefit of youth attending programs with previously acquainted friends. © 2022 The MITRE Corporation.

Cultivating community change to promote food access and healthy eating through participatory action research with youth

Professionals such as social workers, public health officials, cultural networkers, researchers, and community leaders, who are designing and implementing programs and policies, can look to youth to gain a unique perspective on promoting community health. Across the United States, many communities experience inadequate access to nutritious foods that exacerbate poor health outcomes for marginalized populations - people of color, older or disabled adults, and those with lower education or income. To address food access disparities, providing youth voice and building youth empowerment may offer creative strategies to encourage community change. The Youth CAN (Change.Activity.Nutrition) project aimed to engage and empower adolescents to become agents of change for health within their community. Youth became active researchers through participatory action research (PAR) using socially engaged art platforms such as photovoice (photography), street art (graffiti-style art), and spoken word (poetry) to explore their environment and identify facilitators and barriers to healthy eating within their community. The World Cafe activity facilitated conversation among youth and adults to generate ideas to improve community food access. Collaboration between adult and youth researchers, and community leaders led to proposed solutions for improving access to healthy foods within an urban, low-income neighborhood. The Youth CAN project demonstrated how engaging and empowering youth through PAR is fundamental in promoting positive youth development and enabling youth to become advocates for equitable food access in their communities.

Photovoice and Instagram as Strategies for Youth Engagement in Disaster Risk Reduction.

Community involvement is essential for an all-of-society approach to disaster risk reduction. This requires innovative consultation methods, particularly with youth and during pandemic restrictions. This article outlines methods used for a Photovoice project where we brought together student co-researchers from multiple levels (high school, undergraduate, and graduate health sciences) to explore the topic of youth engagement in disaster risk reduction. Over a two-year period, our team used Photovoice as an arts-based participatory method to collaborate with members of our EnRiCH Youth Research Team. We adapted the protocol to continue our project during the COVID-19 pandemic and presented our work in a Photovoice exhibition using Instagram. This article was written from the perspectives of high school and university students on the project. Our hybrid Photovoice protocol facilitated participation through the pandemic, including a virtual presentation at an international conference and online consultation with the Canadian Red Cross.

Egyptian Students Open to Digital Mental Health Care: Cross-Sectional Survey.

BACKGROUND: In Egypt, the shortage of mental health services, particularly for adolescents and young adults, is apparent. Electronic mental health (EMH) has been proposed as a solution to bridge the gap and better address the needs of young people. However, EMH is new to Egypt and its acceptability among target populations is crucial to its implementation and success. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study is to explore the interest of Egyptian youth in EMH, identify perceived barriers to EMH, and inform the design of EMH tools to best address the needs of youth. METHODS: A web-based cross-sectional survey was distributed among medical students at Tanta University in Egypt. Chi-square and one-way analysis of variance tests were performed for inferential analyses using a significance level of .05. RESULTS: Of the 707 individuals who completed the survey (90.9% response rate), 60.5% (428) were female, 62% (438) lived in urban and suburban areas, and the mean age of the sample was 20.5 (SD 1.8) years. The vast majority of participants (522/707, 73.8%) had already used the internet to find information about mental health problems, but the information was unsatisfactory for about half of them (386/707, 54.6%). Almost all students reported that they would prefer web-based therapy if EMH were available through a trustworthy national web-based platform for youth mental health (601/707, 85%). Students believed that emotional difficulties, social support, and coping strategies were the main topics that EMH should help with. The most common perceived barriers for EMH use in Egypt were concerns about privacy (382/707, 54%) and a lack of technology literacy and unfamiliarity with EMH (352/707, 50%). CONCLUSIONS: EMH is a promising strategy for addressing gaps in the mental health care for young people. To construct and implement a digital system of care that addresses the unique needs and preferences of youth, adolescents and young adults should be involved in the co-development and design.

Recommendations for youth engagement in Canadian mental health research in the context of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in reduced access to in-person mental health services, and a shift to virtual platforms. Youth may be uniquely impacted by physical distancing requirements during the pandemic, including limited socialization opportunities, closures of educational institutions, a lack of meaningful extracurricular activities and adverse implications on key developmental milestones. Due to the potential impact of COVID-19 on youth well-being, the need to rapidly transform services to be accessible, and the potential risks associated with this rapid transformation, it is imperative that youth continue to be engaged in research and service development. Young people's perspectives, strengths and skills need to be considered to effectively adapt the delivery of mental health services. Continuing to center youth engagement in mental health research throughout the pandemic can ensure research questions, programs, and services align with the needs and preferences of youth. In this commentary, we pose three recommendations for conducting youth-engaged mental health research during the pandemic, including adapting youth engagement strategies when rapid decisions must be made, the use of tools for virtual engagement, and suggestions for evaluating youth engagement practices. These strategies and principles may be applicable to other scenarios where rapid research or system transformation would benefit from youth engagement, such as time-limited child research by trainees (e.g., dissertations) or natural disasters. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved) (French) La pandemie de la COVID-19 a entraine un acces reduit aux services de sante mentale en personne, et une transition aux plateformes virtuelles. Les jeunes peuvent etre particulierement touches par les consignes de distanciation physique durant la pandemie, notamment par les occasions limitees de socialisation, la fermeture des institutions educatives, le manque d'activites parascolaires et les implications nefastes sur les principales etapes du developpement. Etant donne l'impact potentiel de la COVID-19 sur le bien-etre des jeunes, le besoin de transformer rapidement les services pour les rendre accessibles, et les risques potentiels associes a cette transformation rapide, il est imperatif que les jeunes continuent de participer a la recherche et au developpement des services. Les perspectives, les forces et les talents des jeunes gens doivent etre pris en consideration afin d'adapter efficacement la prestation des services de sante mentale. Continuer d'axer la participation des jeunes dans la recherche en sante mentale durant la pandemie peut faire en sorte que les questions, les programmes et les services de la recherche correspondent aux besoins et aux preferences des jeunes. Dans le present des jeunes durant la pandemie, notamment adapter les strategies de participation des jeunes lorsqu'il faut prendre des decisions rapidement, l'utilisation des outils de participation virtuelle, et des suggestions pour evaluer les pratiques de participation des jeunes. Ces strategies et principes peuvent s'appliquer a d'autres scenarios quand la recherche rapide ou la transformation du systeme beneficierait de la participation des jeunes, comme la recherche sur les enfants en temps limite par les stagiaires (p. ex., dissertation) ou des catastrophes naturelles. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

More collaboration, less seriousness: Investigating new strategies for promoting youth engagement in government-generated videos during the COVID-19 pandemic in China.

Effectively engaging citizens during crises is critical for governments to disseminate timely information and help the public to adjust to the constantly changing conditions. In particular, promoting youth engagement not only enhances crisis awareness and resilience among the young generation, but also has a positive impact on youths' social participation and responsibility. With the increasing popularity of online video services, leveraging online videos to disseminate authoritative information has become a method widely adopted by government. To enhance youth awareness and engagement, two new video-based crisis communication strategies have been utilized on a popular youth-targeted video platform Bilibili in China: creating recreational videos such as animation and music videos, and collaborating with individual video-uploaders in video making. However, their impacts and results are largely unknown, which motivates our study. Guided by Entertainment Education (EE) and Collaborative Governance (CG), we report, to our best knowledge, the first systematic study on how recreational video category and government-citizen collaboration would influence youth engagement focusing on 3347 COVID-19-related government-generated videos on Bilibili. This study reveals that recreational videos successfully promote youth engagement including interaction, feedback and sharing. Collaboration with individual uploaders in video making also has a substantially positive impact on youth engagement. Through an in-depth qualitative content analysis of user-generated commentaries, we further unpacked the unique values (e.g., trust work for youth participation) as well as latent limitations (e.g., imbalanced topic distribution) of the two new strategies. We discuss how the findings enrich EE and CG theoretically, and provide practical implications to effective and engaging communication strategies during crises.

Speaking Softly and Listening Hard: The Process of Involving Young Voices from a Culturally and Linguistically Diverse School in Child Health Research.

The involvement of young people in the planning of research continues to be rare, particularly for young people from culturally and linguistically diverse communities. This paper describes our experience in establishing a Youth Research Advisory Group (YRAG) in South West Sydney (SWS), including barriers and successful strategies. One hundred and fifteen students between school Years 7 and 12 (ages 11-18) took part in at least one of five sessions between 2019 and 2021. In total, we carried out 26 YRAG sessions, with between five and 30 students in each. Sessions focused on mapping the health priorities of the participants and co-developing research project proposals related to their health priorities. Our work with students revealed that their main areas of concern were mental health and stress. This led to material changes in our research strategy, to include "Mental Health" as a new research stream and co-develop new mental health-related projects with the students. Important strategies that enabled our research included maintaining flexibility to work seamlessly with organisational and individual preferences, and ensuring our processes were directed by the schools and-most importantly-the students themselves. Strategies such as maintaining an informal context, responding rapidly to student preference, and regularly renegotiating access enabled us to engage with the students to deepen our understanding of their experiences.

A Crisis for a System in Crisis: Forecasting from the Short- and Long-Term Impacts of COVID-19 on the Child Welfare System.

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrust the world into a crisis - and the child welfare system is particularly susceptible to its effects. This pandemic has exacerbated some of the most problematic aspects of the system, and its impacts will reverberate long after the immediate crisis ends. As COVID-19 spread, families were instantly impacted - in-person family time was cancelled, youth and families were unable to access basic resources, services, and technology, and access to the courts was curtailed. Those short-term effects may give way to long-term harms such as disrupted attachments and delays in achieving permanency. The pandemic also reinforced the importance of key tenets of a well-functioning child welfare system: high-quality legal representation, creativity, and youth and family engagement. Attorneys must learn from the fallout of the pandemic, retain the best responsive practices, and use the lessons learned from this crisis to transform dependency cases, and the system writ large, into what families need and deserve.