A Center for Promise Research Fellow, Professor Linda Sprague Martinez Prepares Youth in Five US Cities to Lead Community Health Assessment

“This is really about asking the question: ‘To what extent do youth have power and agency to inform the policies impacting them?’” Professor Linda Sprague Martinez told Currents about her new project “Barriers to Wellness: Voices and Views from Young People in Five Cities.”

Sprague Martinez set out to engage youth people in the identification of threats to their health and well-being. Current research shows that young people of color and young people from low-income communities are at heightened risk of experiencing poor health throughout their lives, yet policymakers rarely engage with young people in the communities most impacted by these issues.

“Young people are often overlooked as potential stakeholders in research and assessment,” Sprague Martinez said. “Given that their interactions with living and social environments are different from those of adults, excluding youth from the decision-making process poses real challenges to improving health outcomes.”

With the goal of conducting research that might meaningfully inform public policy, this project was launched during the summer of 2016 in five major US cities: Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver, and Minneapolis/St. Paul. In May, cities and partnering organizations/grassroots organizers were first identified. At the project’s conclusion in September and throughout October, results and findings were disseminated.

Each city’s site developed research teams of 6–8 youths largely between the ages of 16 and 25 to engage in this project.

“We started with really basic questions like, ‘What is health?’” Sprague Martinez said. Over a period of several days, she, with the support of CfP staff, trained site teams. The training explored a number of topics, including health inequities, determinants of health, methods in community health assessment, and community research ethics. Participants also viewed Unnatural Causes: Place Matters, an episode from a PBS documentary series exploring the socioeconomic and racial inequities in health.

During the training, youth determined health priority areas and developed assessment protocols for data collection methods in the field, including surveys, observation, and photovoice.

From there, the teams set out into the field to collect data in their communities, which they later met with Sprague Martinez to analyze and contextualize. Ultimately, teams developed local dissemination plans and sent representatives to Washington, DC, to present their findings and make recommendations to the project funder. Each site identified different factors influencing health in their own communities, including stress, safety, substance use, and sexual health. Across all five sites, interactions with police and police brutality were identified as threats.

“We were really able to create a meaningful youth leadership opportunity for youth people of color,” Sprague Martinez said. “At the same time, these findings actually reflect
their lived experience.”

Click to read the full report.