My Contributions- Bethany Devlin

I have only been on the project for a short time. In that time, I have been given the opportunity to work on different aspects of the project. I am grateful for this opportunity as it allows me, to help the young people to begin to put the project in place. As an intern, I have been granted many wonderful chances to contribute to this project and others conducted by the members of the Centre for Children and Young  People’s Participation. My experience has given me the ability to use my own initiative as well as increase my confidence and improve my conversational skills when working with academics and with the young people.

 I have started my internship by conducting a literature review on existing evidence of participatory research with children and young people.This review essentially underpins the project by providing evidence of existing methods used in participatory research with children and young people but also the challenges of using participatory research and what can be done to overcome challenges. The review also discusses the use of social media, the internet,creative outputs and ethical standards and procedures. This review will benefit the project by providing evidence of participatory research methods and how they have worked in benefiting the children and young people to have their voice heard.

Secondly, I was given the opportunity to create a questionnaire based on questions that the young people produced.This was a great experience as the questions were very insightful and would influence many other young people. The questionnaire will soon be distributed into schools and will allow more young people to have their input. I have devised the questionnaire in a safe manner, allowing children and young people to remain anonymous, but we still benefit from their input as this questionnaire will allow the young people to explore the evidence and views of other young people and their views on knife crime.

The next part of my internship will be to assist in the digital side of the project (to be discussed below). In summary, it will involve a digital story made up of different media elements to create a short video which the young people will carry out themselves and put the ideas together. I will attempt to find an ethical social media platform for the young people to share their photos and videos that they want to include so they can share ideas. I have also devised some sample questions for them to compose the video from,these questions should also get the young people talking so that we can gather stories from their perspective to use as audio on the video.