Participatory research with street-involved youth in the Youth Injection Prevention Project (YIP)

Youth participation in research has become increasingly popular, though there is still a paucity of examples in the literature that offer insight into the challenges and opportunities that such an endeavour offers. This is particularly true of research that includes street-involved populations of youth. This paper explores the experiences of six youth in the Youth Injection Prevention Project (YIP), a community-based research project with street-involved youth in the Metro Vancouver Region, using a positive youth development approach and a resiliency and empowerment framework. Although there were many challenges to the collaboration, including issues of time commitment and expenditure as well as overcoming youth’s personal barriers to participation, the results of the YIP project demonstrate that meaningful participation in research can offer youth important avenues to develop employability skills, promote resiliency, empowerment and wellness.