Much of the current media messaging consists of alarmist headlines that perpetuate a protectionist mentality on the dangers lurking on social media. There is a tendency to “pass the buck” on who is responsible for “saving” our youth from their digital worlds: social media platforms go unchecked from government oversight, parents expect the social media companies to prevent harm, educators want parents to guide their youth, etc. How about we learn from our youth as “under-appreciated experts” who can be tapped to improve youth wellbeing? Our motivation is to elevate youth’s experiences (AKA “youth centeredness”) in future endeavors that involve their digital ecosystems. In this chapter, we illustrate a research-and-action case study framed in positive youth development terms, offering a concrete documentation of how to engage youth in equitable and meaningful ways in the co-design of their own digital wellbeing.

Background Literature

The digital context can influence social connectedness, identity formation, learning experiences, and the broader connection to the world (Ross and Tolan 2021). While it is most common to hear narratives of risks of being online, adaptive uses of digital tools may also offer skills necessary for positive development. This is especially true now, when youth are better equipped to navigate and successfully find resources to support their needs in online spaces due to earlier adoption (Bhattacharaya et al. 2019; Ito et al. 2020).

According to positive youth development (PYD) frameworks, the key to understanding youth functioning and wellbeing is to recognize the alignment between context and the individual by optimizing existing assets (i.e., strengths) and resources (e.g., health information, learning tools; Lerner et al. 2010). The PYD movement recognizes primarily in-person settings (e.g., peers, family, school). However, studies are emerging on how peer and mentor interactions via virtual learning spaces can also promote youth wellbeing (Bhattacharya 2019). A recent study demonstrated that peers can be proactive sources to learn digital citizenship and this guidance is significantly associated with more positive social media use in tweens and teens (Charmaraman et al. 2022).

The strengths related to diverse groups of youth include their abilities to gain navigational and social capital (Yosso 2005), especially in the digital age (Hernandez et al. 2021; Ito et al. 2020). This may include the ability to access health-related information and care online, or find communities tied to interests (i.e., affinity groups) and identity (Ito et al. 2020). Also a large part of the strengths in youth, especially tweens and teens, includes their development of key capacities associated with building autonomy including empowerment and agency, social belonging, competency, motivation, and self-esteem (Ross and Tolan 2021; Smith et al. 2021). As we think more about the diversity of individual and social characteristics in a tech-saturated world, we believe a more critical way to keep up with the fast-paced evolution of online spaces while engaging young people and promoting PYD simultaneously is to integrate - and indeed center - youth as key expert stakeholders in our work.

Participatory youth spaces are increasingly common venues for integrating young people’s expertise directly to the process of research and programmatic implementation with equitable skill building and knowledge transfer (Roholt and Mueller 2013). Within the last two decades, there has been an increasing focus on providing youth with more agentic roles in matters of their health and wellbeing, especially among systems that influence their development (Ozer et al. 2020). Youth Advisory Boards (YAB) have been documented to advise organizations on issues ranging from civic engagement and policy (Collins et al. 2018) to adolescent health research (Moreno et al. 2021). More recently, YABs in many of these fields involve youth in the creation of digital interventions. For example, a youth-centered digital application for health intervention implemented their technology with the assistance of a minority, low-income youth advisory board aged 13-24 years (Kim et al. 2015). Other studies highlight the role of YAB’s in advising the creation of mobile games and gamified smartphone apps that were designed to help their users engage with topics related to sexual health (Patchen et al. 2020). Youth in YAB’s also engage with the digital world by advising research organizations on the most relevant topics and concerns impacting themselves and their peers (see SMAHRT 2021). Similarly, youth participatory action research (YPAR) involves youth through inquiry-based, participatory and transformative principles in tandem with adult partnership (Anyon et al. 2018). Such youth-adult partnerships can be seen across programs like youth advisory structures (YAS), YABs and YPARs. These programs share similar principles in that the larger goals are to offer youth the chance to construct knowledge by identifying and researching social problems, create change, practice advocacy, build alliances, and more (Anyon et al. 2018; Haddad et al. 2022). These kinds of intentional collaborations are grounded in youth experiences, offer youth shared power with adults in a participatory environment, and support youth development by sharing knowledge and changing practices to improve the lives of young people and their communities (Anyon et al. 2018; Haddad et al. 2022).

Common outcomes associated with youth advisory spaces include agency, leadership, critical consciousness, confidence, academic engagement, social support, and interpersonal abilities as some of the skills acquired (Anyon et al. 2018; Haddad et al. 2022). Co-design collaborations are especially advantageous for youth from culturally diverse and underrepresented groups to be heard. For instance, Latina youth co-designed culturally conscious technology to promote positive communication with their caregivers (Vacca 2019). Our lab’s YAB builds on the example of these YABs and also innovates by engaging youth not only in creation of interventions or in advising on research topics and methods, but by showing how these two activities can strengthen one another.

History of Designing the Digital Wellbeing Summer Workshop

Our Youth, Media, & Wellbeing lab brings together our expertise in developmental and learning sciences, assets-based youth development and design, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Using an action design research approach (Sein et al. 2011), our summer digital wellbeing workshop, which began in 2019, has brought youth together to co-design their own social media experiences – each year focused on different themes ranging from designing apps for self-regulating phone use to understanding online identity (Charmaraman and Delcourt 2021) to empowering them to pitch more positive online communities to media companies (Delcourt et al. 2022). A key finding from prior iterations of the workshop was the need to intentionally create a safe space to uplift the voices of marginalized youth (Charmaraman, Hernandez, and Hodes 2022) during the early stages of having their first smartphone and social media accounts (ages 11-14). Based on feedback from participants regarding safe spaces, we shifted from a co-ed program to one that prioritizes recruitment of racial/ethnic/gender minority girls because they are often underrepresented in systems focused on digital communication and design (Delcourt et al. 2022; Ito et al. 2020) and are highly engaged on social media platforms that are not designed to consider their wellbeing (e.g., news stories on Instagram leaks). Each year, our digital wellbeing workshop focus would ebb and flow to reflect our qualitative and quantitative participant feedback from prior iterations. It became more clear each year how critical it was to consider what was most relevant, timely, and needed from each cohort, as the ecosystem of social media use for early adolescents could not be “pinned down” for a “one-size-fits-all” approach to implementing a workshop “intervention.” As workshop organizers and youth “allies,” we felt a growing need to continue these conversations with the very young people that we sought to empower and what better way than to form a new on-going, sustainable coalition, so to speak, to place their needs at the heart of our workshop evolution.

To form an alliance to navigate this journey, we joined a national collaborative led by the Technology and Adolescent Health Team at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to guide us forming our very first Youth Advisory Board. Members of our lab attended a meeting with other groups and organizations in the process of designing and implementing their own YABs with the goal of learning from the expertise of the Technology and Adolescent Health Team and collaborating with other YAB facilitators in the nascent stages of their boards. While many of the other YABs represented in the meeting were created by researchers and focused on issues related to adolescent health, our structure, of working with youth who had been participants in our summer workshop to improve the intervention for future participants, was unique. While many other facilitators were grappling with how to recruit and retain their target participants, we were aiming to understand how to involve our ready-made pool of participants in an innovative process that was both youth-centered and goal-driven. The insights we gained from this nation-wide consortium of YABs helped us to shift the structure of our meetings to create more space for youth-driven activities while still meeting our goals and to form strategies for providing appropriate professional development and mentorship opportunities for participants.

In this chapter, we document the inauguration of a Youth Advisory Board (YAB) to help guide our lab’s continued development of this digital wellbeing workshop, from co-developing a board motto and mission statement to launching the next iteration of the workshop in July 2022. To play to the strengths of our lab which is positioned at the intersection of developmental science and HCI, we pulled from the practices of participatory action research (PAR) and participatory design (PD) in order to engage youth as partners and consultants in design and programmatic decision making (Bettencourt 2020; Haddad et al. 2022; Read et al. 2014). Through a case study observation that includes video-recorded electronic meetings, participant reflections, surveys, and a focus group, we will chart the journey of youth who were given opportunities to amplify their voices to support healthy social media use, while developing leadership skills and their own strategies for contributing positively to the shared online experience in the digital ecosystem.

What we hoped to learn:

1. Bidirectional Utility of YAB: How can prior participation in a digital wellbeing workshop enhance the co-design (i.e., recruitment, design, and development) of future iterations of the workshop? What types of opportunities do YAB members benefit from participating in the workshop?

2. PYD of YAB: In what ways can a Youth Advisory Board enhance the field’s knowledge of promising practices for centering youth’s perspectives regarding adolescent wellbeing on social media?

3. Process evaluation: What are key strengths and challenges of our journey for future implementation?

Case Study Methods

Description of recruitment into YAB

The 9 YAB members were purposefully recruited from a roster of past participants or co-facilitators in a previous Digital Wellbeing Workshop. Prior to establishing the board, we received full IRB approval from our institution. All YAB members were informed of the risks and benefits of the evaluation study, that they can opt out at any time, and that their survey and focus group evaluation feedback would be kept private. YAB members aged 18 and older signed consent forms and minors provided assent and required active parent/guardian consent to participate in the evaluation. We recruited girls or non-binary individuals in middle school, high school, college, or post-grad (aged 12-24). We included participants from a broad age range with the hope of establishing mentor/mentee relationships. The pseudonyms of our teen YAB members are Andrea, Robin, Sharon, Sheila, and Wanda and the young adult members are Bonnie, Cynthia, Parker, and Tracy.

Sources of data and analytical procedures

In this pilot implementation of the YAB, we conducted a process evaluation for purposes of iterative quality improvement. Our data sources include both quantitative and qualitative data that documented participants’ perspectives before, during, and after the YAB. First, we asked them to complete a pre- and post-survey anonymously in order to encourage honest feedback and to understand how perceptions may have changed as a group over time. Questions included their preferences for topics over the course of the meetings and their motivations for joining the YAB. The post-survey questions repeated the ones from the pre-survey with additional items related to workshop sense of belonging, how they would advertise the YAB in the future, whether they felt the YAB empowered them to make valuable adjustments to the workshop, and suggestions for improvement.

The primary data sources that informed our 2nd learning objective included 90 minute transcripts from 7 meetings and a focus group held over Zoom between December 2021 and July 2022. These were audio and video-recordings that included automated transcriptions via Zoom that were later verified by a co-author. Five of the co-authors conducted an initial thematic review of codes (Robinson 2022) deductively related to our Positive Youth Development goals of 1) being youth-centered, 2) inclusive, 3) valuing perspective-taking, and 4) collaborating on solutions. They also coded whether these observations were staff- or youth-driven or instigated. Five of the co-authors then verified a different transcript in order to assess agreement, ask questions, discuss until there is consensus, or ask a third coder to break any ties. The focus groups were coded using the following system of thematic codes related to outcomes supporting positive youth development: belongingness, motivation, empowerment, agency, self-esteem, and competency. A different co-author then verified the focus group coding, which followed the procedure of discussing until consensus, otherwise a tie-breaker was used by another co-author. All codes were entered into NVivo 12.0.

Results and Discussion

I. Bidirectional utility of Youth Advisory Board

In this section, we describe our motivation to form a YAB, our main objectives in each YAB meeting, and summarize key changes made to the summer workshop ‘22. In the first introductory meeting, we began with the mission of the YAB: “To advise YMW lab about how to create and sustain the most relevant, timely, and feasible virtual digital wellbeing workshop.” Then we displayed the goals of our YAB: “1) To recruit engaged teens and young adults to provide guidance for improving the Summer Workshops, including Recruitment, Curriculum, Facilitating Zoom meetings and 2) To provide professional development opportunities to YAB.” Toward the beginning stages of the YAB, our workshop facilitation team attended a nation-wide convening of inaugural Youth Advisory Boards organized by the University of Wisconsin, Technology and Adolescent Mental Wellness program.

One of the take-aways from that convening was creating space for youth to take ownership of critical tasks such as creating committees to tackle a key YAB goal. Therefore, we divided up the YAB into committees related to Outreach and Recruitment, Activities and Curriculum, and Design which was born out of the enthusiasm of our youth to hone their Canva skills. Each meeting contained agenda items related to the whole group, breakout sessions with the committees, and then a debrief session. Whole group discussions would include topics such as how to create safe virtual spaces for young girls to talk about their social media experiences and appropriate online learning platforms for middle school youth. Small committee groups would focus on specific tasks such as creating recruiting materials, brainstorming about ice breakers, or how to scaffold online tools with youth with different STEM backgrounds.

The following is a list of ways in which the collaborative, co-design input from the YAB yielded concrete changes for the structure and approach to the summer workshop ‘22:

1. Added an additional day to workshop (e.g., formerly 4-day workshop became 5 days)

2. YAB co-led ice breakers and some activity intros

3. Experimented with levels of engagement (scaffolded vs. free agent)

4. Fewer Seesaw (digital storytelling) assignments

5. Redefining safe spaces for an all-girl environment

For our second goal of creating professional development opportunities for the YAB, we included activities designed to provide a two-way flow of learning and growing between the YAB and our staff at the Youth, Media, & Wellbeing Research Lab. Our youth were given opportunities to be expert panelists for digital wellness surveys, tour the Wellesley College campus, be mentored by older youth in different career stages, and co-led lesson introductions during the summer workshop ‘22.

Positive Youth Development goals - documenting youth-centered processes

The following section showcases the thematic analyses of 11 hours worth of YAB meeting transcriptions centered around our Positive Youth Development goals which encompass the tenets of: a) being youth-centered (65 instances), b) inclusive (45 instances), c) valuing perspective-taking (65 instances), and c) collaborating on solutions (61 instances).

Theme: Youth-centeredness

Under this theme, we coded the YAB meeting transcripts that indicated where the goal of the activity or conversation was centered on youth’s perspectives. For instance, we coded “youth-centered” whenever a staff member asked for ideas from the youth or what matters to them or when youth raised an issue that was their idea, from their own perspective, or their specific background. In one of the earliest meetings, members of the YAB shared their thoughts and practices with social media. A teen going by the pseudonym “Wanda” observed that certain social platforms are designed in a way to promote a specific kind of use, such as “Instagram…they tend to post the best pictures of themselves in their lives. So it's like selfies that are overly edited or maybe some travel pictures that are [of] beautiful scenery or some food, that's again full of filters. But on Snapchat, at least when I use it and I've seen people around me use it, it's more personal, where you can take random selfies of your room or your face and do funny faces…” Wanda also followed her observation with the lack of privacy surrounding Snapchat with their maps feature and how it promotes people to turn their location on.

An older youth member going by the pseudonym Tracy shared her experience, “I have two social media, like two Instagram accounts; one is spam and one is main, like Wanda said, everything's perfect, my perfect self. For the main, I put my name, age and my actual location and for my spam, I put [my name] as peanut butter and age is 9999999 and location”. Wanda goes on to distinguish the different ways that youth’s social media use develops over time:

“Like Sheila [a teen YAB member)] said, maybe you have an account where you don't post much. I feel like that's the general trend with middle schoolers, because the way they use social media is more following people they really like rather than being active on it. I think that changes when you go to high school because you kind of want to build an image you'll care more about your followers. And then in college like Tracy said it's more about self awareness about what you post, because you never know who might see it” .

When the YAB facilitators asked about what young people’s social media use goals were, the answers varied from middle schoolers definitely “don’t want to take a break - they like getting attention and new followers” (Andrea) to “I feel like it depends on the person, because my friends are just always on social media – a few of my friends recently deleted a few social media apps, like taking a break from them like taking a few days off of school for their mental health.” (Robin). In another meeting, we asked the YAB about who they learned about social media from, and Sheila responded with “​​"I would say friends. Like how to work certain things on the app or something that you might not know how to do." These conversations supported youth-centered activity development for the future workshop, particularly when there is such a wide range of experiences within the smaller YAB group that would need to be translated for the larger workshop group.

Theme: Inclusivity

Our recruitment strategies yielded a diverse group by age, race/ethnicity, and geography. The 9 YAB members ranged in age from 12 to 24. Three were in middle school, 2 in high school, 3 in college, and one was a master's level graduate student. Board members came from diverse racial/ethnic identities: 2 Black/African American, 3 Asian American, 1 Latinx, 2 Middle Eastern, and 1 White. The majority of YAB members lived in Massachusetts except for two who lived in New York and North Carolina. All 9 YAB members had experience either being a workshop participant or co-facilitator in a previous workshop.

Within our meeting transcriptions, we thematically coded exchanges that were focused on being equitable and inclusive such as making a comfortable space for all perspectives to be heard and allowing youth from different backgrounds to get to know each other and find ways that they are similar. We noticed that compared to other themes, staff were much more likely to instigate an “inclusive” discussion topic (31 instances) than youth (10 instances). At the first introductory meeting, we attempted to craft that safe space to set a precedent for amplifying all voices: “We invite everyone to be respectful of each other's opinions. Not everybody’s going to love an activity, not everybody’s going to think it’s all that bad or that valuable. It's easy to say ‘oh I don't like something’, but then, you might be the only one that likes it and you're kind of afraid to tell people ‘Well actually I kind of thought that was fun.’ You know if you're not in the majority that's okay, you can be the dissenting view.”

An example of when youth instigated an inclusive atmosphere was when we were reviewing the new webpage showcasing the YAB. We were trying to decide the order of listing individuals, and Tracy spoke up, “Yeah I like it being alphabetical order because, we are a team so everybody contributes the same way and having like advisor, college students and middle school students separated kind of creates a hierarchy and that's something we don't want.”

Theme: Perspective-taking

This theme encompasses reflection on social and technical systems rather than just one’s own circumstances. This could include discussing how social media affects youth or other people other than themselves, including how social media content is portrayed or privacy concerns; thinking beyond here and now and how actions/behaviors affect one’s future. Interestingly, the theme of Perspective-taking was far more common as a student-instigated theme (41 instances) compared to adults instigating (18 instances). Tracy reflects on how middle school students might use social media differently: “I think I only had this spam account after I came to college so I'm not sure whether middle schoolers would have that and have an understanding of how they can present them differently on social media. I feel like in middle school people care, at least for me, but it might be different now…when I was in middle school everybody just posted pretty silly things on their main, so you don't necessarily need a spam account, but in college it's a little different because you're meeting so many new people.”

When we asked the youth about how to make workshop participants more comfortable talking and sharing with each other, Robin offered, “I feel like to get people to talk, you want to make sure everyone knows each other well in the group so we like icebreakers… also before the first five minutes of each meeting you can pair up or three people just so can they can talk about whatever and just get to know each other and then everyone could go back as a group and say something they learned about a different person.” Andrea suggested, “I also think that it can get awkward sometimes when I’m closer to your age leading icebreakers, like the conversations might help too.”

When we invited a guest speaker from the Boston Children’s Hospital Digital Wellness Lab, our group had an opportunity to help define terminology as part of their ongoing research program. One intriguing conversation revealed different definitions of “aloneness” – do you consider yourself alone when you are interacting with others online, given the traditional notions of aloneness involving physical proximity.

Parker: I feel like, for me, what differentiates social media from something that's private is like the level of publicity. You know, like apps where there's a possibility to share something more publicly or with a broader group of people, those are social media, whereas a group chat isn't social media.

Cynthia: I would not say I’m alone. Because I do that a lot - I video call my friends, and then I say oh I’m hanging out with my friends.

Sharon: Maybe gaming and having a voice chat while gaming I would say you're not really alone.

Cynthia: If someone's streaming and people can watch them, but they can't really interact with other people would they be alone?

Tracy: I have a different opinion, I feel I draw a really clear line between physical space and online space and I feel like even when I’m talking to my friend [online] I’m physically alone in the room I’d still say I’m alone.

Theme: Collaborating on solutions

This theme included a “can-do” attitude of problem-solving rather than focusing on what is “wrong” about social media, often perpetuated by media headlines. These practical solutions involved discussing workshop improvement goals, including content, recruitment of participants, and evaluation. One perennial issue is around encouraging active participation on virtual meetings with strangers:

Bonnie: I like the idea of a trivia night. Could be something that we're all interested in whether it’s like social media related or not.

Cynthia: Really cool.

Tracy: Adding on to Bonnie’s idea, I think at least some team bonding event will be helpful because it's going to less feel like it's just one person talking or a couple of people talking, it's more like a conversation, discussion-based meeting.

Cynthia: Adding on to the do-not-hesitate-to-ask-questions can we say don't hesitate if you want to share something? People say there's never a right time to share so you don't have to wait for the right time…

At one of our meetings, we brainstormed as a group about how best to introduce privacy settings to youth in the workshops:

Parker: Robin, I see that you had to do two different social media because all of the settings weren’t applicable to TikTok so that's something to maybe think about, right? Do you think there's a better way to do that? Do you think it'd be better to have students pick their own privacy settings that they're interested in?

Cynthia: For the location one I have to go to settings on your phone to turn off location and I don't know. I feel like that also applies to other apps.

Robin: I did not know you could do that till I read yours.

Parker: We're learning things.

Tracy: Also, I feel like, after watching the video, there could be a brainstorm session about why we have the privacy setting on because, in the video it only said you have to turn the location setting to private but it didn't necessarily explain what is the potential danger, so having a little bit of conversation might be helpful.

Bonnie: Really good idea, Tracy cuz I was thinking there's so many documentaries and shows about how much you can learn about a person just by looking at their social media page and just a post from 2017 to 2020 could be connected and it's really unnerving to know that.

Finally, no matter how much you prepare for an upcoming cohort, there is always an element of the unknown of how workshop activities will eventually be perceived. The following is an example of an instance that encompassed more than 1 thematic code (e.g., Youth-centered, Perspective-taking, Collaborating on solutions):

Tracy: We're having a conversation of how we underestimated those middle schoolers because we introduced an app that we use in a 200 level college Computer Science class and they were able to pull it off, and do exactly the same thing as we did. There's actually a pilot study that we read before we designed everything and our turnout was so much better than theirs.. their Figma prototype was kind of sketchy. [Our participants] completely went beyond my expectations - glad to see that.

II. Process evaluation

As the YAB commitment came to an end after the successful closing of the Digital Wellbeing Workshop in 2022, we were able to create a space for reflection on the experience via a focus group format led by JMH (co-author). We deployed a multi-method approach to evaluating the YAB also by asking the YAB members to complete a pre- and post-YAB survey, in addition to an end-of-year focus group. Reinforced by the survey, the following specific themes of PYD applied to the YAB context were coded for the focus group session:. The focus group session unpacked both the strengths of the first iteration of this level of involvement that the youth experienced in the process of co-designing a digital wellbeing workshop, as well as the areas for improvement also highlighted in Table 12.1.

Table 12.1: YAB Focus Group Reflections and Post-Survey Findings

Overall, members of the YAB acknowledged seeing their work, time, and efforts being implemented in the workshop (empowerment and agency; competency). The activities enhance the knowledge of the atmosphere within their peer digital worlds and allow youth to elaborate on navigational and social strengths while using social media. The culmination of the time spent in each session and outside-meeting activities such as the college tour for the middle school YAB members allowed for a sense of community (belonging) to be built in the mutual interest of creating a positive digital space for young people like themselves, or a younger self. Excitement was especially generated in smaller subcommittees where the YAB members applied their own strengths (competency):

“I really liked when we were designing the shirts so it's really problem solving and creative.” - Robin

“I really liked the activities committee and it gave me a chance to really share my experience with social media, but there was a lot to talk about in a short period. That's why I suggested the meeting for individual committees.” - Sharon

The first time applying a YAB to explore digital wellbeing did not come without obstacles. One key challenge is simply time. The members of the YAB agreed that virtual meetings of 90 minutes per session came with its challenges to stay actively engaged (motivation), especially given that most meetings occurred in the evenings after school or work. However, the youth were not shy to suggest that adding more meetings, shorter times, and more consistent over the months (e.g., bi-monthly), which could significantly improve their motivation to engage in activities and co-working. Another suggestion related to timing included a desire to have sub-committees also find more time to meet outside of the bigger YAB meeting to improve productivity and further reinforce the community-building (belonging). Youth members shared their views on how important the relationship building is among the youth, but also with the adult facilitators:

“I really like contributing and brainstorming all the ideas, but I feel like sometimes it's really structured and the topic is designed by staff. So I think, maybe we can involve youth a little bit in designing the agenda of the meeting, and what we can brainstorm during the session.” - Tracy

The relationship building is critical to a bidirectional transfer of knowledge and fostering a sense of empowerment and agency among youth in spaces with adults, even in the digital context. A learning from this pilot YAB is that as the adult facilitators, we should lean into the knowledge that youth are experts on their own wellbeing broadly, and allow time and space to co-design for digital wellbeing through their own practices. For example, the YAB expressed that they wanted to be more involved in the creation of the agenda for each meeting session and suggested more consistent co-designing activities to improve upon their competencies for the co-designing digital tools. Interestingly, they also wanted to grasp a deeper knowledge of the research and development process, which is a critical part of centering youth stakeholders in the creation of digital tools to support positive development of the current and future generations of youth.

When asked how they would describe advertise the YAB for future members, the answers often pointed to the importance of diverse perspectives and the co-learning that was part of the journey:

“...group that supports new ideas and welcomes diversity and gives youth a chance to take leadership over topics that they are passionate about”

“safe space for adults and teens to come together and brainstorm personal and professional development for self and others”

“YAB is an opportunity for youth to collaborate to improve how the lab educates their peers about social media as well as a supportive environment for youth to reflect on their own use of social media.”

“A group of youth from middle school to college and beyond who come together to learn and grow.”

Lessons learned for future implementation

In our inaugural year of forming a Youth Advisory Board to inform the co-design of our youth digital wellbeing intervention, we learned many lessons that will shape how we structure and integrate the valuable input. One key insight was the evolving notion of what constituted “youth-centered.” Our initial conceptualization was to be protective of youths’ time and limit the interactions to not overwhelm them, but in the end we found out that youth were motivated to be more involved, and wanted more time for relationship building between the younger and older participants. As we “collaborated on a solution” to this, our next iteration will likely move away from an every-other-month cadence to every other week in the 5 months leading up to future summer workshops. This will provide more frequent and regular interactions to improve mentoring relationship-building and opportunities for bidirectional growth opportunities.

This year also provided a training ground for how to be “inclusive” within an intergenerational youth advisory structure. The strengths of this unique age span provided us a continuum of developmental stages - from those who were currently middle school aged to those who had the maturity and reflective capacity to refer to their own prior experiences as younger selves. Future implementation will remain “inclusive” to a wide age range, however we will likely switch the ratio to prioritizing the inclusion of teens so that each older mentor has more young mentees.

One of our key insights this year was the importance of “perspective-taking” - that the primary goal of the YAB wasn’t simply a one-way direction of influence and knowledge-seeking. We not only sought critical insights to improve the development of our summer digital wellbeing workshop program but also wanted our youth to gain valuable skills to improve competencies and communication skills and have fun engaging with each other throughout the experience. Part of the skill-building (and “collaborating on solutions”) process was to implement sub-committees - a feature that the YAB believed fostered spaces for a sense of belonging and self-esteem to be uplifted.

Young people’s experiences in digital spaces - and the implications for their wellbeing - are often not well understood by adults. We found that advancing a youth-adult partnership (Anyon 2018) to explore their experiences online was meaningful, both in terms of this project as an intervention to learn about positive uses of social media as well as serving our research agenda in understanding the role of social media in identity construction. We documented a meaningful pathway to positive development by engaging youth in the process of our journey of co-creating more positive digital ecosystems at different levels, including forming subcommittees to tackle problem-solving and understanding how to balance personal interests and preferences with the good of the larger community in the ecosystem. Youth-centered co-design methods can span anywhere from concrete activities to creative pursuits like t-shirt design to re-conceptualizing what it means to be “youth-centered.”

Following other remote experiences with youth (Bhattacharya 2019), our YAB interacted fully remotely and this online context was well-suited to the needs of the YAB. We demonstrated in this case study a full iterative research-and-action cycle wherein youth who participated in the workshop were recruited to be innovators for the next iteration, thereby utilizing their expert guidance to advance our co-created workshop goals. Given how introspective today’s youth have become about their own digital ecosystems, we have demonstrated that future implementation of Youth Advisory Boards may also transcend preconceived notions of youth “readiness” for meaningful engagement in the co-design of their own technological worlds.

References

Anyon, Yolanda, Kimberly Bender, Heather Kennedy, and Jonah Dechants. 2018. "A Systematic Review Of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) in the United States: Methodologies, Youth Outcomes, and Future Directions." Health Education & Behavior 45(6):865-878.

Bhattacharya, Arpita, Calvin Liang, Emily Y. Zeng, Kanishk Shukla, Miguel E. R. Wong, Sean A. Munson, and Julie A. Kientz. 2019. "Engaging Teenagers in Asynchronous Online Groups to Design for Stress Management." Pp. 26–37 in Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children. Boise, ID, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3311927.3323140

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