Our Senior Peer Researcher and Public Involvement Officer Eva shares some things she’s learnt from our work bringing the world of mental health research to school children.
Eva Asiedu-Addo
This year, our young people’s team has been talking a lot about how to make sure that those involved in our research projects are representative of young people in the UK.
We believe that it’s important to make sure research is shaped by young people from different backgrounds and experiences, so it better reflects the needs of those the research will impact.
However, there are lots of barriers that make this difficult. For example, young people report that a lack of understanding and awareness of involvement opportunities is a key barrier to getting involved in mental health research.
One way we can begin to address these barriers is through proactive outreach – but how do you find young people who don’t already have an existing interest in mental health research?
There is no guide for how to run outreach for mental health research involvement in schools, and lots of our efforts have been a process of trial and error.
Bringing research to schools
One way we have begun to do this is through reaching out to schools. Young people spend almost half their life in school – and although the out-of-school population is rising, there are very few places where you can guarantee to find so many young people with a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences.
Knowing this, members of our team have been building relationships with schools over the past few years. What first started as attending careers fairs at schools has now developed into running assemblies and workshops.
However, there is no guide for how to run outreach for mental health research involvement in schools, and lots of our efforts have been a process of trial and error.
When we began planning our outreach efforts, we knew we wanted to increase understanding and awareness of what research involvement is, so here is what we have learnt!
1. It’s important to use creative methods
How do you engage a group of young people who may otherwise have no interest in what you’re saying? You have to be creative!
One of the ways we have engaged students is through smaller workshops with groups of young people in a classroom. With access to tables and space for young people to write together, we thought there would be no better way to increase awareness and understanding about what youth involvement actually is than letting students experience it themselves.
Armed with lots of colourful pens, A3 paper and question prompts, we asked students to be as creative as they wanted and to treat the page like a graffiti wall. Our question prompts included: ‘What makes someone feel like they belong?’; ‘Things adults don’t understand are stressful…’; and ‘What helps when life feels overwhelming?’.
Here are some of the results:
Another way we have engaged students is with a larger group of young people in an assembly setting.
To avoid death by PowerPoint we used a guessing game to increase awareness around mental health research. We asked the students to get into groups to guess how many sweets are in a container – the prize being the sweets themselves.
- In round 1, the container is in a bag and they have to make a guess without seeing the container.
- In round two, we take the container out of the bag. Each group gets a chance to change their answer with the new visual information they have.
- In round three, we give each group the opportunity to ask a question that will give them more information about how many sweets are in the container. They are acting as researchers and have a final chance to use this research to change their answer.
- The winning group wins the sweets, and we explain to them that the more evidence they had, the more information they had. That’s what research is.
Often young people will leave not remembering much of what you told them, but they will remember the activities they did.
What started as a room of students staring (slightly blankly) during our PowerPoint intro, turned into a room of students all engaging with each other and having fun.
2. Embrace the chaos
Unlike a typical day in the classroom, involvement work doesn’t require a silent, orderly room and the more comfortable young people feel in sharing their opinions, the better.
Our smaller workshops began with a tower-building activity. Students were given some household materials (spaghetti, marshmallows, straws) and asked to construct the tallest, most stable tower.
We learnt the hard way that this activity is messy, and though next time we will use more reusable materials like pipe cleaners and blue tack, the change in energy that this chaotic, messy activity brought to the room was amazing.
What started as a room of students staring (slightly blankly) during our PowerPoint intro, turned into a room of students all engaging with each other and having fun. This chaos was a perfect precursor to the activities we then went on to do.
Larger assemblies are even more chaotic! Having a group of 50 Year 8 boys all moving around, chatting and debating brought a lot of energy – but allowing space for this and showing that we wanted to hear what they had to say was really important.
We are still on our journey of figuring out what works for engaging young people in our schools’ work.
3. Bring some incentives!
Unlike the majority of our involvement work, often young people in schools have not chosen to sit for an hour and listen to a random stranger talk about mental health research. So understandably, they need an incentive.
One thing we found works is giving students an opportunity to compete to win something. Whether that’s sweets or our McPin branded fidget toy, the prizes we gave out were a hot commodity and great motivation for getting students engaged.
What’s next for engaging young people in research?
We are still on our journey of figuring out what works for engaging young people in our schools’ work, but the journey is worth the opportunity to introduce the world of research involvement to new groups of young people.
