Working with the National Youth Advisory Board of Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights and partner organizations, since 2024 a team of 16 youth co-researchers from across Canada have been hired and trained to join community-academic research team to play an active role from guidance on research questions, conduct the qualitative interviews with youth, review and coding of interview transcripts to co-development of knowledge translation (KT) products.

Stage I: In 2024/ 2025, 16 youth co-researchers from across Canada engaged in a series of virtual planning workshops to set collective research priorities, roles for relational youth partnered research, and engaged in capacity-building to create and plan for arts-based digital mapping research of sexual health services with, by and for youth.

Stage II: From April-December 2025, youth co-researchers completed 100 digital mapping interviews with youth from across Canada. Purposive sampling aims to reach diverse youth voices (e.g. 2S/ LGBTQIA+, Indigeneity, racialized, more rural and remote geography, new immigrant). In addition to regular debriefs, in September 2025, the YCR & academic research team met for a reflective workshop, review of initial findings to date, and plan purposive sample to ensure underrepresented geographic and social identities were represented, with data collection wrapped up in December 2025.

Stage III: In summer/ fall 2025, a smaller group of YCRs interested in participatory data analyses engaged in a series of virtual training & planning workshops to develop a NVivo codebook and plan collaborative analyses. Iterative coding and analyses will be ongoing throughout winter/spring 2026. In addition, beginning in January 2026, to facilitate more flexible coding engagement for the broader YCR team, we have hosted regular, drop-in virtual coding parties using the same coding framework in word with colour codes (and music!) to facilitate collaborative coding. The team then inputs youth’s codes into NVivo.

Stage IV: In May 2026, we will be hosting a two-day youth knowledge mobilization (KM) workshop in Victoria, BC with the 16 youth co-researchers and academic team to review the key findings, analyses, plan paper writing and facilitate the creation of youth-led KM products (e.g videos, storyboards, visuals) from the digital sexual health mapping research to share back with policy makers, providers, and general public.