Listening to young people’s voices: Attempts at developing context- and participant-sensitive approaches

Abstract

This article explores the methodological impact of sharpening researchers’ listening skills as part of the development of more context- and participant-sensitive approaches to research. The starting point is an analysis of structured app interviews with young people at a multicultural festival. Through the research process, we became increasingly aware of forms of communication we were prone to overlook, such as the here-and-now engagement of the participants, their carnivalesque expressions and associative and fragmented narration. Listening more openly required a reflexive extension of the data analysis and gave us unexpected glimpses into the life world and identity formation of young people.

Introduction

As researchers we learn about the lives of others through listening. In this article, we contribute to the discussion of children’s voices in research by emphasizing the significance of listening in the phase of analyzing data. The voices we have listened to belong to young people in a research project in which we explored what characterized their experiences and meaning-making while attending multicultural school and community events (Dewilde et al., 2021). Aspiring to develop a context- and participant-sensitive approach to multicultural events, our research team has aimed to utilize the adaptability of qualitative methods to adjust to age groups, activities, and geographical contexts. As researchers in the education field, we have sought to access young people’s voices to better understand the learning, experiences, reflections, and emotions young people take away from participating in particular events in particular places. Bringing forth young people’s perspectives has been recognized as a challenge for researchers over the last three decades (Daelman et al., 2020; Hallett and Prout, 2004; Soto and Swadener, 2016; Spyrou, 2016).

In our previous research, we found the method of face-to-face qualitative interviews with young participants to be lacking in the context of loosely structured multicultural events. Our frustration with the lack of access to participants’ perspectives spurred a design innovation and the development of a multilingual interview app called My Memory App. ¹ The app provided interview prompts in many languages that could be answered in a private space in the respondent’s chosen language at the multicultural festival. The result was a rich and interesting dataset that we have previously analyzed in Dewilde et al. (2021). Our next step was to write about My Memory App from a methodological perspective; in doing so, we reanalyzed the data. What struck us most during this process was how many of the recorded answers had avoided our attention. To paraphrase Yoon and Templeton (2019: 75), our attention had been focused on what we had already deemed interesting. This experience of listening differently and finding much more than we expected took our research in a new direction. Our emphasis was no longer on how the app facilitated access to young people’s voices but rather on how listening differently brought out new aspects in the data. The result is this article, in which we analyze what we initially did not hear. Better listening has made us more aware of how the communicative features that Mazzei (2009) called “undomesticated” can convey young research participants’ perspectives. These are communicative features that are unclear, not easily denoted, and often overlooked as off-topic (Spyrou, 2011). Guiding our analysis is the question of what open listening brings out in young people’s reflections on participating in a multicultural festival. Our main findings are that more careful listening made us see young people’s here-and-now engagement, how they bring in the carnivalesque and humorous, and how their narratives can be associative and fragmented but become deeply meaningful through close and patient listening. The remaining article has four parts. First, we discuss theoretical and empirical contributions to better understand the role of listening in conducting research. The second part addresses methodological issues, and the third presents our analysis before we conclude by discussing the implications of our findings. We reflect on how our contribution relates to critical perspectives being raised regarding research with children and young people, such as tokenism, exploitation of young people’s time, and hollow claims of empowering research participants.

Listening to the voices of children and young people

Alongside the search for young people’s voices in research has been the acknowledgement of the need for young people to be heard by adults (Blum-Ross, 2013; Booth and Ainscow, 2011). Issues of voice and listening are visible and influential topics in debates on research with children and young people (Hallett and Prout, 2004; Hanna, 2022; Lavee and Itzchakov, 2021; Lewis, 2010; Soto and Swadener, 2016; Spyrou, 2011, 2016). Providing space for children and young people to be heard adheres to a critical paradigm shift in youth and childhood research that criticizes a conception of young people as passive receivers of adult input and views the child as an active agent capable of constructing their own subjectivity (Soto and Swadener, 2016). In this section of the article, we first discuss how the aim to include young people’s voices in research does not necessarily result in better listening. In the second part, we address features of communication that are methodologically challenging for practicing what Back (2007) names “the art of listening”.

More participant-sensitive approaches are often signaled through a distinction between conducting research with young people (Cahill, 2007) rather than on young people. However, involving children and young people does not in itself guarantee that the research benefits the group, and Roberts (2017: 142) argued that we as researchers are “still learning that there are occasions when such involvement may be exploitative, simply another box to be ticked, or a voice of endorsement on an adult project.” Sharing Robert’s (2017) concern, Hartung (2017) argued that adults’ willingness and ability to listen are not always present in practices that seek to include young people. She pointed out how there are frequent examples of research in which adults claim to have empowered and given voice to young people and Hartung’s critique is that such claims have been taken at face value and have not been sufficiently scrutinized. Similarly, Spyrou (2011, 2016) critically analyzed discourses on participation and questioned whether the intention to empower participants and the creation of spaces for expression are sufficient measures to compensate for the asymmetrical relations of power between adults and young people.

Researchers are in positions to convey young people’s perspectives in ways that can influence political decision-making, social policy, and curriculum formation. Researchers, however, are also driven by self-interest in fulfilling the requirements to publish (Yoon and Templeton, 2019). Hence, the accessing of young people’s voices in research is a complex phenomenon, where methodological soundness depends upon researchers’ abilities to identify their own motivations and recognize the interplay between researcher positionality and knowledge creation. In other words, seeking to include young people in research has implications for research methods. Following Hartung’s (2017) line of reasoning, researchers’ expressed aims to be inclusive and participatory do not ensure substantial participation, and claims to conduct research with young people need to be critically evaluated to prevent the participation of young people from becoming a token rather than a reality. To involve children and young people in research is necessary, but not a sufficient step toward substantial participation. The involvement itself does not erase the power vested in formulating research questions and having the final say in data analysis and writing.

The methodological path dependency of power asymmetries between adult researchers and children is well illustrated in Yoon and Templeton’s (2019) reflexive analysis of the interplay between a researcher and a child in a project designed to be child-centered. The child had taken photographs from her daily life, some of which immediately attracted the researcher’s attention, as she saw an interpretative opportunity in the data and a potential story about intersectionality and gender. In the conversation with the child, the researchers signaled her interest in and curiosity about these pictures; however, the child selected other motives among her photographs that were not equally appealing or easy to read for the researcher. One selected photo showed two people on a sidewalk. After reluctantly giving in to the child’s choice of photos, the researcher discovered how much these pictures could tell about the daily routines of the child and her family’s cultural traditions and home. Yoon and Templeton (2019) described the mundane nature of much qualitative research involving children and young people and discussed how researchers’ perceived constraints, such as limited time to spend on analysis, can cause children’s voices and narratives to be sidetracked. As a result, the main story becomes what the adult researcher or educator sees as important in children’s expressions.

Lewis (2010: 20) voiced a similar concern and noted that “the rush to hear such voices masks the danger of being insufficiently careful about how we go about hearing those voices and scrutinizing not just methods but also methodologies.” Templeton described how careful listening to children in ways that allowed their stories to take precedence was not only a physical practice but also “entailed multiple reflexive encounters as I hedged my adult-informed theories and practices to make space for children’s meanings” (Yoon and Templeton, 2019: 73). Hedging does not imply a naïve belief in bracketing the researcher’s own positionality but simply allows time and space for young research participants’ own ideas and interpretations. These ideas can also be challenging to grasp because “children piece together their own realities through narrative fragments or moments of time, but the arc is not always obvious to us adults” (Yoon and Templeton, 2019: 72). Similarly, Eldén (2013) showed how multivoicedness in a child’s communication reflects the complexity of the life world, and how it is the researcher’s task to develop methodological approaches that enable listening and constructing narratives together with the child.

Fragmented representations rather than coherent narratives, playful and humorous communication, and silence are examples of communicative modalities that can make it harder for researchers to actually hear what young people are saying. Bakhtin (1984) described laughter and comic and clownish manners as part of children’s “carnivalesque” voices and saw these as indicative of how children and other people experiencing subordination conceive of the relations of power. An example is provided by Back (2007: 18) who wrote about a research participant in a project that aimed for democratic research participation. The participant was elusive, evasive and expressed “wildly disparate things” in an attempt to undermine the hierarchy of the researcher and the respondent. In reflecting over this interaction, Back (2007) showed how such non-compliance to expected behavior made the involved researchers more aware on the actual limits to participant involvement and inspired increased reflexivity on their power in the process of research. Another expression of the carnivalesque is humour, and MacLure et al. (2010: 497) noted that humor is almost always represented as a problem in research. Researchers have often interpreted humor as resistance to research itself and, ultimately, as something that needs to be overcome because its noise drowns out what they imagine to be the authentic voice.

Silence in children in an interview situation has also been conceived as a problem and can easily be interpreted as a failure of the research to bring about findings; instead, silence should be seen as important in itself. Lewis (2010: 20) explained that “listening better includes hearing silence and that silence is not neutral or empty.” Refusing to put one’s experiences on display or let one’s voice be heard does not necessarily mean that one is silenced in the sense implied by well-intended dialogical initiatives or methodological strategies. Rather, the choice of being silent could be willful and could express the young person’s agency. Haavind (2005) clarified that children’s hesitation or unwillingness to voice their independent opinions on shared matters may very well reflect an awareness that no such independent position exists for them in that moment. Moreover, as Spyrou (2016) has emphasized, researchers too readily explain children’s silence as a lack of interest or passivity. Mazzei (2003) explored how different listening can change interpretations of research participants’ silences from participants “having nothing to say” (2003: 363) to “inhabited” silences that are in themselves meaningful. She described silences as being among the “unobtrusive traces of empirical materials” (2003: 357) that are worth pursuing to gain richer data and new insights. To notice these traces requires “casting off a traditional understanding of what counts as empirical materials worthy of consideration” (2003: 367). In our listening, following these traces made us discover the fleeting emotions of the here and now, the strong presence of humor and the carnivalesque, and the narrative fragments that could be pieced together.

Starting point, positionality, and methods

In this article, our empirical starting point is the analysis of data gathered through a multilingual app we constructed to access young people’s voices at a multicultural festival. Located along the shores of Lake Mjøsa, the festival offers activities, exhibitions, food, and music historically rooted in different nations and cultures. Walking inside the festival venue, visitors can learn Eritrean braiding and cornrowing techniques, meet the Rajasthan Heritage Brass Band, a group of Indian circus musicians dressed in red and orange clothing playing classical Indian raga music on traditional instruments. Modern Arab popular music is performed onstage, while a Greenlandic Inuit mask dancer and storyteller scares visitors by suddenly appearing behind the listening audience. By curating an innovative mixture of cultural expressions and interactive workshops and activities, the festival brings the world to the participants with the goal of promoting cultural diversity and encouraging social interactions that cultivate social cohesion.

My Memory App was designed to allow the young festival participants to speak freely on site, that is, without adult supervision and presence, as they were experiencing the festival here-and-now. We first analyzed these interviews for an article (see Dewilde et al., 2021) about young people’s experiences and meaning-making. In this process, we experienced that some responses became more central to our analysis than others. To further develop our research methodology, we reanalyzed the data and expanded our openness by insisting on every utterance being important, simply because it was something a young person chose to tell us through the app.

Interviews and participants

It is no easy task to access young people’s voices at a 2-day festival with 11,000 visitors. Aiming to develop context- and participant-sensitive methodologies, we pondered how to adapt to the festival environment. We wanted to reach young people, as they were participating, to get rich data without disturbing them in their festival experience. The festival management provided us with a yellow Poletta camper on site and labeled us an activity in the festival program under the name Bobla (“The Bubble”). Being amid the activity allowed us to get a sense of the atmosphere and interact with young people as they were participating freely in this informal setting. We combined the private space (see Punch, 2002) of the camper with mobile media technology to conduct structured interviews without our presence. In different ways, several young people showed appreciation for the privacy of the space. The name My Memory App mirrored our interview prompts (see below). We provided the questions in the languages of the largest immigrant groups in Norway to make it easier for young people to express themselves and to signal that we, as researchers, would stretch ourselves to listen to their answers (e.g., Martin-Jones et al., 2017).

The app asked participants to address two prompts. The first stated “Please, tell us something about what you have done at Stoppested Verden” and the second asked “Which thoughts and memories does the event evoke?”. We piloted both prompts with potential users. This testing was an important yet time-consuming process because, unlike less-structured interviews, app interviews do not allow for flexibility in the moment (Mann, 2016). However, the app interviews had similarities with unstructured interviews in that they were informal, non-directive, and conversational (Mann, 2016). Before the young participants entered the wagon, we prepared them for the two prompts and mapped their preferred recording language. In addition, we intended for the prompts to be open and non-evaluative, like free narrative interviews, as we were interested in examining young people’s experiences rather than soliciting more formal evaluations of the knowledge they gained at the festival.

We recruited 86 young people between the ages of 12 and 20. Of the participants, 60 were girls, 24 were boys, and we did not record the gender of 2 participants. While most recorded alone, two friends asked to go into the camper together on seven occasions, and three friends recorded together on five occasions. Some recorded in Norwegian even though they spoke an additional minoritized language, something we interpreted as signaling to us that they were proficient in the majority language, too. Three girls recorded in Arabic and two in Pashtun. These were all learners of Norwegian. In line with the requirements of the Norwegian Data Protection Services, we notified all participants that their participation was voluntary and that they could withdraw at any point without explanation.

Researcher positionality and reflexivity

Inspired by critical approaches to research involving young people (Hartung, 2017; Lewis, 2010; Yoon and Templeton, 2019), we believe it is important to reflect upon our own positionalities as adult researchers in the festival context, as these shaped the way young people interacted with us and ultimately the data and knowledge we produced together. We were four researchers working together, coming from different academic backgrounds with a shared interest in diversity and education. We conducted research at this festival not because the young participants needed us but because it was an opportunity for us to learn, to pilot an innovative app interview method, and to write and publish. With this article we seek to bring the knowledge we have acquired based on young people’s research participation into new contexts where it can inspire new insights and practices: as a contribution to research literature, our teaching, and our collaboration with teachers in schools. We cannot claim to have empowered the young people participating in our research; in fact, many of them probably do not even remember having answered the interview prompts as more than a short intermezzo in a fun day at the festival. The participating young people contributed to our research and, in doing so, gave a moment of their time and provided glimpses of their lifeworlds that we seek to learn from and utilize to strengthen children’s and young people’s participation in formal and non-formal educational contexts.

Data and analysis

Multilingual research assistants transcribed and translated recordings in languages other than Norwegian. In many ways, the data were different from the kinds of interview data we typically analyze. First, the recordings varied greatly in terms of length. Some were up to 90 s, whereas others were as short as 10 s. Some participants had recorded lengthy answers to one of the questions and nothing to the other. Second, the answers were more fragmented, chatty, and on the go than what we were used to from previous interviews with young people. When reading the transcripts, we realized it did not make much sense to distinguish between the answers in terms of to which prompt they related.

As noted in the introduction, we first analyzed the data in line with the central concepts in our fields related to intercultural learning and citizenship (Dewilde et al., 2021). Returning to the data now anew, we made a conscious effort to listen openly to the recordings by prolonging the listening phase and delaying categorization. Ultimately, the undomesticated features of young people’s answers stood out as noteworthy aspects of the data. Researchers often emphasize the value of time in data collection with young people (e.g., Spyrou, 2011), but we would argue that spending time on analyzing the data is equally important. We highlighted and challenged the strategies of analysis by rereading the data several times, both individually and as a team, while reminding each other to observe features in the utterances of young people that were potentially stimulated by the free nature of the app and of the recording space, as well the festival context. In other words, listening openly required us to stay in the data long enough to start pondering, instead of looking for illuminating quotes and what we noted as particularly interesting (see Spyrou, 2011). In prolonging the process of analysis, it became even more evident to us how coding, interpretation, and oscillating between the data and familiar theoretical concepts are factors contributing to the asymmetrical relations of power between young people and adult researchers.

To expand our analytical process, we paid attention to what was said, how it was said, and what was not being said, in line with our discursive approach (Talmy and Richards, 2011), which added layers to our understanding of young participants’ positionings. Moreover, we considered the features that failed to meet our interests in the first round of analysis and were thus easily ignored. Based on our multiple close and annotated readings, we constructed the following three recurrent patterns across the data: here-and-now engagement, young people’s carnivalesque approaches to the interviews, and associative narration. We turn to these features of young people’s voices that had previously gone unnoticed in the next section.

Pursuing undomesticated features of young people’s voices

Here-and-now engagement

Diversity, citizenship, migration, culture, and a sense of belonging were important topics in the multicultural festival for children and youth. These topics are also generally politicized and contested. However, a striking feature in the Stoppested Verden data is the absence of polarization. The app interviews rather displayed an abundance of here-and-now engagement; in other words, young people’s utterances reflected in-the-moment experiences with an emphasis on joy and excitement. In previous analyses, we overlooked this feature, similar to Yoon and Templeton’s (2019) description of not recognizing the value of the child interviewee’s choice of photos to illustrate her lifeworld. When we acknowledged expressions of here-and-now engagement as important and valuable, we heard youth talk about movement and enjoyable sensations, which showed they were in control and could end the app interview as they liked before continuing their movement through the festival.

The recordings appeared as a short stopover in the young people’s exploration of the festival. They included many references to what participants had done up to the point of the app interview, such as walking around with friends or family members, tasting different foods, and trying out different activities. This in-presence and sense of being on the move within the framework of their festival attendance was not put on hold when they entered the research site. Rather, the yellow Poletta camper in the middle of the festival area appeared to have provided a space where the young people could extend and articulate their here-and-now engagement. This understanding can be illustrated by the young people’s use of many strong superlatives about their festival experience, describing it as “fantastic,” “very pleasant,” “very important,” and “very cool.” Participants said that “it is great fun to go here” (girl aged 13) and that the festival “makes a great impression” (girl aged 13).

Obviously, the superlatives showed an overall positive attitude; more importantly, listening closely to the many variants indicated that the festival was of value for the young people for many different reasons, including that it appealed to the senses and was socially and intellectually stimulating. Similar to Mazzei’s (2003) description of initially not hearing research participants’ silences, the superlatives were in danger of being overlooked or regarded as superficial and were thus dismissed as data in our initial analysis.

The following transcript of three girls who were clearly having a good time is an example.

We’ve bought food [laughter], and we’ve made all kinds of different things. We’ve walked around the stalls, and then we made a boat, you know, at the Thailand stall. Yeah, that was fun. We made that boat for her, that Thai water goddess. And then we ate [laughter], and we’ve watched a lot of shows, and it was kind of nice, and we are going to buy more food [laughter], […] The food brings back lot of memories because, eh, I love food, have always eaten spring rolls, yes. My mom can make spring rolls, and then you can come over to me, or something like that. Oh my god, I also want to go to a spring roll party [laughter]. Invite my friend for a thousand spring rolls. Eh, this evokes memories from previous times I’ve been here [laughter], and it reminds me of when I’ve been here before. And the food is very good [laughter]. I cannot breathe! It, it makes such a fun energy [laughter], that you can hear now, we laugh at everything. Yes, it is great fun to go here with friends and stuff, and it is good that it is on Sundays, so that we have something to do. Yes, it is.

Apparently, also among peers aged 14, the participants seemed to feel comfortable openly expressing joy. The privacy of the Poletta camper and the open prompts gave participants the opportunity to “do their thing” and disregard conventional expectations of the research interview. Analytically, listening openly and acknowledging these statements as valuable involved immersing ourselves in the mix of enthusiasm, laughter, frivolity, and sincerity. Thus, rather than dismissing such data or ending in “simplified” or “caricatured” analyses (Spyrou, 2016: 19), highlighting them made us come closer to a better understanding of the range of the young people’s festival experience and recognizing joy as a meaningful emotion.

The research site, as a private space inside the camper behind a closed door, also gave access to highly personal here-and-now engagement. A girl with an Eritrean background (aged 12) responded in the following way to the prompt, “What memories does the festival evoke?”:

My home country [Eritrea]. Well, it makes me happy to be here. I’m happy to be able to be here, and it evokes memories, and I feel at home in a way when I can sort of see Eritrean dresses and food, and so on. Yes, then I feel like I’m back in my home country. [Whispers:] It is so pleasant here I’ll take off my shoes. Goodbye!

With the words “happy” and “pleasant,” this girl appeared as content with the festival as the three girls above. However, the elaboration of her feelings stood out, indicating that her attendance at the festival represented a unique here-and-now moment. In contrast to what a traditional interview could potentially retrieve, the final whispering mode was spoken almost as if she were talking to herself. She expressed joy over finding a place that kindled a sense of home and gave rise to the impulse to take off her shoes as one can do at home. Listening more closely without rushing (Lewis, 2010), the girl’s recording stood out as an expression of thoughts and emotions that the festival experience evoked.

The way the participants ended the My Memory App sessions also gave insight into how their control over the recording space made the interview part of their movement through the festival. In contrast to a more traditional and rigid researcher-led interview session ending with a last summarizing question, such as “Would you like to add anything before we end the interview?”, the young people found themselves alone inside the camper, free to push the end button whenever they wanted, here and now. Clearly, they understood that they were responding to or even communicating with the research team while recording. Yet, as they were in control of the situation, they seemed comfortable ending as they pleased. As the last example showed, they were in a position to withdraw from responding to the last prompt altogether (Mazzei, 2003), concluding with phrases like “bye-bye” (boy aged 11), “adios” (girl, age not recorded), “that should be it” (boy aged 17) “eh, yes” (girl aged 15) “it is like, yes” (girl aged 14) and even, “I did not understand the question” (boy aged 17). In most instances, the sessions ended without any notice or last remarks. As they pushed the end button, they seemed already on their way out of the camper and ready to continue enjoying the festival experience, possibly understanding the research site as one of its many possible activities.

Bringing in the carnivalesque

For some of the young people, participating in the app interviews in the Poletta camper also opened a space for silence as well as humorous, light-hearted, and off-topic answers to the prompts (see Hanna, 2022; Mazzei, 2003). These young people’s responses subverted and challenged assumptions regarding young people’s behavior in an interview setting through humor and discursive transgressions. In this sense, these young people’s voices may represent a carnivalesque protest (Bakhtin, 1984), marked by a satirical challenge to our authority as researchers and the traditional asymmetry between the adult and the child in the context of semi-structured interviews.

In one recording, three boys (aged 13, 14, and 15) started their answers by commenting on what they experienced as low-quality music at the festival, saying, “the songs sucked.” They continued by returning to the questions and commenting on their experiences with the festival, but in a rather incoherent and contradictory way: “I don’t have so many memories. I believe it is the first time I’ve been here, but I enjoyed it. It was boring.” After laughing aloud, the boys ended the recording by saying, “You know, my friend’s a little nuts right now!” The recording of two boys (aged 17 and 18) offered another example of the carnivalesque mode. Speaking Pashtun, the boys started with a common Arabic greeting used by Muslims: “As-salamu alaykum.” They continued by emphasizing that the festival was a nice place for meeting people: “It is the first day of the festival, and people are gathered in Hamar [the city where the festival is located]. People drink beer the whole night and come out in the daytime. That’s good.” Considering that Stoppested Verden was an alcohol-free festival for children and youth, the boys’ answers could be interpreted as an ironic and parodic characterization of the festival and their own attendance. For some of the young people at the festival, the private recording space in the Poletta camper provided the possibility to try out answers that defied expectations and challenged the hierarchy between adult researchers and participating young people. One participant said, “Well, while this is happening, it’s recording our voice, in which case anything can be said, really. You cannot control what is said.” This statement pointed out both the freedom to transgress discursive expectations and the possible irony or absurdity of us having created a communicative space without being present ourselves (see MacLure et al., 2010).

Listening more closely made us aware of how the participants’ carnivalesque freedom also drew boundaries that could be studied in their own right, in line with Mazzei’s (2003) concept of unobtrusive traces of data. Several participants used their freedom to be silent without answering the questions. Such resistance would have been difficult for children and young people participating in face-to-face interviews (Haavind, 2005). The silent recordings could have been a result of technical problems; however, as the quote above signaled, the private space of the Poletta camper and the freedom the children and young people were given to express their here-and-now experiences through the app made the refusal to let one’s voice be heard a possibility as well.

Associative narration: situating oneself through a stream of consciousness

For several of the young people, sitting alone inside the Poletta camper set in motion a stream of consciousness where one impression or memory led to another, not necessarily resembling “a fixed notion of the ‘real’” but surfacing “the chaos and contextuality of young people’s lives” (Blum-Ross, 2013: 61). These associative accounts constituted small stories, which Esteban-Guitart (2012) characterized as acts of self-identification in communicative spaces. Small stories are part of ongoing identity work. Yoon and Templeton (2019: 60) also noted how young people’s stories are often fragmented and that the practice of listening then involves the piecing together of these narrative fragments. In the answers to the app prompts, we can hear how participants were connecting and making sense of narrative components, such as experiences, memories, interactions, social relations, and place. The small stories presented in the app interviews often included an explanation of the young person’s companions at the festival as well as some thoughts on activities they had participated in, food they had eaten, and what had been fun, as well as reflections on the topic of the multicultural festival. In one such account, a girl (aged 14) stated her assumption that the festival was about cultural diversity before embarking on a memory:

I visited Poland, and when I went there with my class, we went through Auschwitz, which is a concentration camp for, or it used to be anyway, for Jews and such, and it was quite different. And where the culture was, it was interesting, but sort of—all the things we saw were very frightening. But when we did go to the city in Poland, for example, the food was a little different from what I [usually] taste because I come from India, and I’m more into, like, spices, pepper, and lots of chili stuff, and yeah. And in Poland, there was more, like, there wasn’t any salt and stuff, so it was pretty different, but they did also have pretty good dessert.

The girl continued to explain how she thought multicultural festivals are important because they give people a taste of foreign cultures and then expressed how different cultures can be inspiring and offer elements that can be combined to create one’s own unique style:

I like watching other cultures to compose my own unique style because I’m inspired by a whole lot of other countries for my own style and my own personality, and that is what I get out of so many different cultures.

In this short story, the girl connected aspects of her own memories and identity to the concept of culture. In the first part of her story, she associated culture with nation and history, as she described visiting Poland and Auschwitz, as well as voicing how the war memorials were scary. Then, the narrative took a turn toward culture as habit and acquired taste when she connected culture to food and discussed how her perception of Polish food as bland (apart from the quite good dessert) had to do with her own Indian background. The next step of her story offered a third, more cosmopolitan, and consumer-oriented view of culture, with different national cultures offering interesting and appealing elements from which a person can create an individual style. The girl thus shared with us a glimpse into her identity work, where she was in the process of constructing stories of who she was, her sense of belonging, and conceptualization of her own becoming.

To perceive her story, we, as listeners, had to be sufficiently patient to follow the narrative twists and turns. Listening provides the opportunity to come closer to an understanding of a young person’s transnational identity—in other words, how she constructs her own subjectivity (Soto and Swadener, 2016).

Another young girl (aged 12) also brought in her transnational family background:

There are so many countries that remind me about my childhood because my mom is from Peru, and it evokes memories for me and my mom, so it is special, in a way, for us to come here. And like my uncle, he is from Colombia, and he talks about it all the time, and it does mean something, mean something for us. But I come from this place, but I’m half from Peru, so I do know some Spanish, and it reminds me about Spain, and then a bit of India here.

This stream of consciousness was a small story that connected different identity aspects of the girl’s origin and family ties with her impressions of multicultural representations at the festival. She used the expression “from this place” to describe herself and then brought in her transnational family background and how her identity as half-Peruvian made it special and meaningful for her and her mother to visit the festival. Her identification with Peru led her to think about what the festival reminded her of, which was Spain but also India. Then she added, “I do not quite know if India is with me, but actually, I do think it is quite nice here, like with cobras and all that. That was all I was going to say.”

Her small story accentuated the carnivalesque aspects of a multicultural festival that turns the local place upside down and brings thousands of people together, as we explored in the previous section. The girl associated this carnivalesque atmosphere with India. Although she stated that she did not know exactly how India related to her, she explained that she liked it and then mentioned cobras as an example. We can only guess what the cobras might mean to her, but they may allude to the drama and liveliness that come with the image of snake charmers, as traditional orientalist fiction would depict an Indian marketplace.

To listen to such associative narrations, we, as researchers, must have patience and receptivity. As we have illustrated, the young people did not present clearly stated and domesticated arguments, but rather streams of consciousness characterized by fragments, movements, and associations. Careful listening revealed small stories and brought out young people’s ongoing identity work, imaginaries, and transnational belongings.

Conclusion

Recognizing that the inherent power asymmetry between adults and young people cannot be eliminated in most research (see Hanna, 2022), we argue for the development of more reflexive and context- and participant-sensitive approaches in research involving young people. Such sensitivities apply to both data collection and analysis. In this article, we have reflected upon the use of app interviews, a method that allowed us to gain young people’s perspectives on their participation in the context of a festival. The emphasis, however, is on the role of listening in developing a context- and participant-sensitive methodology. How researchers listen impacts what is heard, and in this research project, listening differently to the data made us discover the potential of following the unobtrusive traces of the data (Mazzei, 2003), the importance of listening patiently to piece together fragmented narratives (Yoon and Templeton, 2019), and exploring the role of the “undomesticated” (Mazzei, 2009; Spyrou, 2016) features of young people’s voices.

According to Spyrou (2016), researchers’ quest to promote the participation of young people in school and society has been characterized by a belief in the possibility of finding authentic voices. As a result, the undomesticated features of young people’s voices have frequently been overlooked (see also Hartung, 2017) because they point toward experiences and opinions that can be difficult to articulate or may be seen as provocative to utter, both in general and in relation to researchers in particular. When we, as researchers, perhaps without giving it much thought, filter out these features of young people’s voices in our analyses of interview data, the data become more susceptible to particular interpretations. Hence, researchers’ good intentions to include young people might ultimately reproduce asymmetrical relations of power rather than facilitate substantial participation of young people.

In this project, we created a space in which young people could speak more freely compared to a face-to-face interview situation. When answering the app prompts, they were sitting inside the camper and could refrain from answering, keep their answers short, or make jokes without violating any conversational norms for interaction between adults and young people. Our research team spent more time reading and discussing each expression, approaching each expression as a message from a young person to us as researchers, and hence as important whether it touched upon issues of interest to us or not. In this way, we sought to counter Yoon and Templeton’s (2019: 57) warning that “the parameters of the study can dictate just what is heard, interpreted, and analyzed.”

Our analyses revealed three ways that “unobtrusive traces of data” (Mazzei, 2003: 357), “undomesticated” (Mazzei, 2009; Spyrou, 2016) features, and fragmented narratives of young people (Yoon and Templeton, 2019) made themselves visible in young people’s responses to our app interview prompts. First, their statements were oriented toward emotions and sensations rather than conveying a particular message and communicated the joy of being present in the moment and the value of the here-and-now. Second, their expressions could be rebellious and silly, and through that demeanor communicate how they experienced power relations. Third, young people’s stories were sometimes associative and incoherent, but these fragments could still be pieced together by attentive listeners to better understand the formation of their identities and worldviews.

Here-and-now engagement, carnivalesque expressions, and associative narration do not readily translate into political claims regarding young people’s influence on society and thus cannot easily be accommodated through a process of empowerment. In the absence of claims, it also becomes harder for us, as researchers, to argue that young people benefit from participating in our research projects, a claim that often accompanies the involvement of young people in research (Hartung, 2017). However, when young people share such engagement, an open listener can receive a glimpse into the formation of a worldview and the development of positionality in this world. When pondering the meaning of young peoples’ expressions, we pay attention to the potential of young people to challenge hegemonies (Bakhtin, 1984) and distance themselves from the authority of adults, including us as researchers. For a moment, we, as researchers, become the audience for them as storytellers, which represents a momentary reversal of a power relation that enables them to produce meaning on their own terms (Blommaert, 2009). Such tiny shifts in power can give young people faith that their own voices are heard and that they are worth listening to. Nonetheless, in a project such as ours, we believe it is important to acknowledge that we, as researchers, take the most advantage of the research participants’ contributions. The tokenism implied in claiming empowerment for young people where there is none (see Hartung, 2017) is not only negative and dishonest but also not really necessary. It is legitimate for researchers to learn from young people. Their stories enable us to learn. Our responsibility as researchers is to take this learning and put it to good use in our writing, our teaching, and our communities.

This study revealed the potential loss for researchers who do not devote sufficient attention to the unexpected or seemingly unimportant. Context- and participant-sensitive insights can influence our own practice as researchers in education by encouraging critical self-reflection, which poses consequences for both how we communicate with young people in our research and how we work with data analysis. Increased reflexivity regarding our role as researchers can also inspire other groups of adults working with young people. The participation of young people in civil society and their political engagement in both formal and non-formal channels also depends to a large extent on the type of space adult people make for young people’s engagement, and the power adults are willing to cede. For researchers, context- and participant-sensitive methods hold the promise of accessing and understanding more of young people’s lifeworlds and providing better opportunities for learning from and with young people through better and more open listening.