Competing Priorities in Participatory Research With Adolescents: Reflections on Achieving Meaningful Participation for Intervention Development in Samoa and Nepal

Participatory approaches to research with adolescents are often seen as inherently superior to other qualitative methods because of their potential to redress power imbalances and enhance engagement. In reality, implementing participatory approaches is resource intensive and a complex balancing act where compromises have to be made. In this article, we share our experiences of using participatory approaches for intervention development with adolescents in Samoa and Nepal as part of two independent research projects. We reflect critically on the challenges we faced in relation to ethics, power dynamics, logistics, data quality, and benefits to participants, and how they shaped the meaningful participation of adolescents. We argue that encouraging reflexivity and discussion about the challenges and compromises we make in our research not only provides a space to learn from each other, but can enable more impactful and transformative participatory research with adolescents.