Youth as Partners, Participants or Passive Recipients: A Review of Children and Adolescents in Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR)

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is an orientation to research that places value on equitable collaborations between community members and academic partners, reflecting shared decision making throughout the research process. Although CBPR has become increasingly popular for research with adults, youth are less likely to be included as partners. In our review of the literature, we identified 399 articles described by author or MeSH keyword as CBPR related to youth. We analyzed each study to determine youth engagement. Not including misclassified articles, 27 % of percent of studies were community-placed but lacked a community partnership and/or participatory component. Only 56 (15 %) partnered with youth in some phase of the research process. Although youth were most commonly involved in identifying research questions/priorities and in designing/conducting research, most youth-partnered projects included children or adolescents in several phases of the research process. We outline content, methodology, phases of youth partnership, and age of participating youth in each CBPR with youth project, provide exemplars of CBPR with youth, and discuss the state of the youth-partnered research literature.