Why Involve Adolescents in the Policy-making process?

1. Health is placed in a broader developmental context. Because of adolescents’ emerging capacities and independence, it is tempting to focus on individual responsibility for behavior change. However, adolescents are embedded in families, schools, and communities. Most are not self-sufficient, and are dependent upon the adults and social capital in their lives to support healthy behaviors. Consistent with social-ecological approaches (Bronfenbrenner, 1986), adolescents were clear that they needed healthy environments and supportive adults to be healthy themselves.

2. Adolescents provide new perspectives, ones that policy-makers may have not previously considered. Because of their somewhat unique developmental perspective, adolescents conceptualized health issues quite differently than adult service providers and policy-makers. For example, for Indiana adolescents, the two core mental health issues were stress and fatigue. For adult ICIAH members, core mental health issues were anxiety and depression. These are quite different. Anxiety and depression are individual pathologies, whereas, stress and fatigue are interactions between the youth and the environment. The treatment of anxiety and depression are medication and therapy; stress and fatigue requires structural changes in the adolescents’ environments.

3. Involving youth can improve the relevance of youth health education and risk reduction messages. When a group has a role in decision-making, those decisions are likely to be more relevant to that group. We saw this clearly with health education messages. Participants made it clear that they were capable of understanding more complex risk reduction messages. Oversimplified messages (such as “Just say no to alcohol and drugs”) were felt to be not reflective of the complex realities of their lives. For example, participants felt that sex education should acknowledge the positive aspects of sex, as well as prevention – as one young woman said, “sex is good – just wrap it up!” (Ott et al., 2011). 

4. Youth held a mirror to adult policy decisions, and what we saw was not always pretty. Youth input has the potential to keep adult policy-makers honest, to make sure our actions match our words. Youth were very sensitive to contradictory messages in their environment. Our participants noted that, while health teachers exhorted the importance of food choices, schools maintained soda and candy vending machines for students and eliminated physical education classes.

1. Examine our own assumptions about youth capacity. By approximately age 14, youth make decisions in a manner similar to adults (Kuther and Posada, 2004); As youth gain life experience and progress through adolescence, that capacity expands. We found that youth were capable of, and in fact expected to be, treated like collaborators.

2. Move youth from informants to leaders. The ideal is to have youth at the table as co-decision-makers (Klindera and Menderweld, 2001). The reality is that there is a wide spectrum of youth involvement. In our focus groups, we only asked adolescents for input (and even this limited role was helpful!). Others, such as the Advocates for Youth, have been successful in hiring older adolescents and young adult “near peers” in decision-making roles (Klindera and Menderweld, 2001).

3. Account for developmental level. Younger adolescents need more support and structure, older adolescents can operate in a more independent and collaborative manner.

4. Bring youth in early. The earlier youth can be brought into the process, the bigger the impact. An example from our work is the Indy Teen STRONG Project, a research study examining sexually transmitted infection (STI) screening in community settings for adolescent boys. Adolescent boys are an understudied group, and less is known about uptake and acceptability of STI screening. Therefore, my team created a teen advisory board consisting of 14-18 year old boys. The advisory board met bi-monthly across the length of the project, and provided solutions to challenges such as accessing hard to reach boys, making consent forms youth-friendly, and survey incompletion.