Conceptualizing Meaningful Youth Engagement in Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health Programming

Background and Objectives: The Youth Engagement Network (YEN) was a three-year project focused on strengthening meaningful youth engagement in sexual health programs. It sought to answer the question, “What is a useful framework for meaningful youth engagement of vulnerable populations in sexual health programming?” Methods: The YEN chose Group Concept Mapping (GCM) as the approach to answer their learning question. GCM is a mixed-methods process that can be used to integrate the unique perspectives of a group of individuals. The approach entails 1) brainstorming ideas related to a prompt, 2) individual sorting and rating of the ideas, and 3) the application of multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) and hierarchical cluster analysis to integrate the individual sorting information and develop a series of concept maps. Results: Seventy-four young people and adults generated 141 responses to our prompt. These were pared down to 82 statements that were then sorted and/or rated on importance by 113 participants. Our final cluster map focused on 9 concepts: Facilitators, Diversity, Relevance, Access, Connection, Comprehensive Sex Ed, Co-development, and Space. Conclusions: We found GCM to be useful for identifying potential components of a framework to move the field toward more meaningful engagement of young people in sexual health programming.