Youth Participatory Action Communication Research: A Model for Developing Youth-Driven Health Campaigns

ABSTRACT

Youth offer valuable insight on health communication needs and solutions in their communities. We propose youth participatory action communication research (YPACR) as a model for health campaign development that engages youth perspectives in applying systematic theory-informed communication research to addressing youth-identified health priorities. YPACR informed a series of paid high school internship programs in West Philadelphia, in which youth interns identified mental health help-seeking communication as a need among peers. In Phase 1, guided by the reasoned action approach and Hornik & Woolf method, youth interns conducted a survey measuring behavioral beliefs, normative beliefs, and control beliefs associated with mental health help-seeking, as well as trusted sources of mental health information, among local high school students. Survey results suggested control (self-efficacy) was an important message target and peers were trusted mental health information sources. In Phase 2, youth interns developed TikTok-style messages focused on strengthening control beliefs and promoting a youth-selected mental health support resource. Youth interns distributed an online survey experiment to test whether youth-created messages shown alongside resource information increased help-seeking self-efficacy compared to an information-only control. The YPACR framework contributed to youth-relevant campaign goals, study measurements, recruitment approaches, data interpretation, and message design. We discuss the benefits and challenges of this youth-driven health campaign development model and recommendations for future research.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Robert Hornik, Emily Falk, Joseph Cappella, Ira Harkavy, Cory Bowman, Anna Balfanz, Faustine Sun, Michael X. Delli Carpini, Jarrett Stein, Emma Jesch, and Danielle Clark for their feedback and support on this project and to the Provost Graduate Academic Engagement Fellowship at the Netter Center for Community Partnerships for making this research possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2024.2386713

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [grant number 2T32CA057711-28]. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.