When Researching Youth Contraception, Include Young Voices in Study Design
April 1, 2025
By Melinda Young
Asking young people to contribute to research for improving contraceptive access can be a good strategy to improve contraception education and engagement that targets teenagers and young adults.1 Researchers asked Canadian youth to help improve contraception access as they sought to understand youth attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, and experiences in Canada, says Sarah Munro, PhD, an assistant professor in the school of public health at the University of Washington in Seattle.
“We were interested to understand things impacting youth choices around contraceptive methods,” she explains. “Cost really matters to youth when they’re choosing between long-acting and short-acting methods, in particular.” Young people want to know more about managing their periods, acne, and reversible methods, she adds.
“We interviewed a large cross-section of youth — diverse,” Munro says. “We were specifically interested in reaching out to youth who may be historically underrepresented, and we’re partnering with them.” Underrepresented youth include those who identify as male or female and trans, young people who are first or second generation in Canada, urban youth, and youth experiencing homelessness, she says.
Working with teenage research assistants was a wonderful experience, Munro says. “I hope other researchers find ways to engage with youth in using these kinds of participatory models because youth are so excited and motivated and have the capacity to make an incredible impact,” she says.
In Canada, any adolescent can seek information and care for contraception and abortion without involving a parent. Any provider can help them. But younger adolescents may have no experience with meeting a reproductive healthcare provider on their own and could use more information on how to do this.
One goal of researchers is to improve messaging and information for young people, and that is why researchers decided to ask their target audience what they thought. “How do we partner with youth to create a research project that is useful?” Munro says. “We want knowledge that is useful to youth, too, and we made sure youth were equal members of the research team.”
This included teaching young researchers how to collect data and recruit participants. “Youth were research assistants, leading the design, co-designing workshops, and working with a graphic designer to design messages,” Munro says. “They helped create materials that were attractive and appealing to youth, and they reached out and built relationships with youth-serving organizations.” Young people ages 16 to 24 years were involved in the research, and four young people had their names on the published paper.
“We were able to do this work because we had a funder that wanted to invest in salaries of community partners,” Munro says. The young people were paid just like the adult research staff, and they were involved in an 18-month period of setting up data and analyzing data.” One of the youth team members stayed on to work as a liaison as the manuscripts were written.
The high school students involved in the research were doing this as part of a high school coop experience, which gave them the time latitude for their research work. The young researchers will meet again in September 2025 to develop stories and brief videos that summarize the findings and can be shared with youth, the community, practitioners, and policy makers, she explains.
“These will be animated videos,” Munro says. “One of the things that our youngest research assistant on the team — who is about to graduate from high school — [did] was to develop a dissemination strategy and map out how to share research results with youth; animated videos was an idea that the youth got excited about.”
Munro learned from the experience that when young people talk about what matters to them, it is common sense, and researchers and clinicians should listen to what they have to say. “As youth participated in data analysis, we were able to understand how the impact on future fertility was something that came up for youth,” she explains. “They wanted to know how contraceptive methods may impact their ability to have kids later on.”
This is not a topic often discussed, and Munro had not expected that concern. But it made sense once she learned of their personal experiences as some of the research team members self-identified as racialized newcomers to Canada, and they came from places where there was a history of reproductive coercion, including forced sterilization. “That’s an important concept — having youth on a team who had lived experience,” Munro says.
“I want to do more of this. It’s such a wonderful experience to be a lifelong learner as an academic and to learn from youth as experts around their own bodies and needs,” she adds. “It’s really humbling, but also really motivating.”
Melinda Young has been a healthcare and medical writer for 30 years. She currently writes about contraceptive technology.
Reference
1. Khan Z, Seiyad H, Jacob K, et al. Young researchers’ reflections on workshops with youth to develop research recruitment materials. Res Involv Engagem. 2025;11(1):9.
Asking young people to contribute to research for improving contraceptive access can be a good strategy to improve contraception education and engagement that targets teenagers and young adults.
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