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We’ve been arguing that youth-centered R&D is the key to creating solutions that actually work for young people. It should be part of the fabric of how youth experiences are created. This blog post isn’t remaking that argument. Instead, it’s a peek behind the curtain of how In Tandem is innovating its way to make it possible.
For youth-centered R&D to go from a novelty practiced only by true believers to a ubiquitous feature of everything young people experience, it needs to be safe and easy, and it needs to lead to better outcomes—for both young people and the adults that aim to serve them. That means driving down the cost of engaging young people at every stage of the R&D cycle while maintaining the conditions that ensure that each engagement is an impactful exchange of value.
This post is the first in a series of what this kind of innovation looks like in practice. Using our recent test of a sense-making process as a case study, we’ll share the process by which In Tandem experiments to generate deeper insights, faster and at lower cost. What did we try, why did we try it, and what are we learning?
Why Sense-Making Matters
Most youth‑serving research follows a familiar pattern: adults design the questions, young people respond, and adults interpret the results. Even with the best intentions, this creates an invisible filter. Adults’ assumptions, professional incentives, and institutional blind spots shape the conclusions that get drawn.
We already support youth-centered question design to address the front end bias. And we create conditions that have proven to generate higher response rates and high quality responses. Youth-centered sense‑making—a process where young people participate in deciding what data means—addresses the final limitation of adult-filtered research. When adults are the only interpreters of data, we risk drawing confident conclusions that don’t fully reflect young people’s lived reality.
Youth‑centered sense‑making is therefore another way to improve the quality of the inferences organizations draw from youth data. It doesn’t replace adult expertise. It grounds interpretation in the perspectives of those closest to the experience. So how can we make this safe enough, fast enough, and easy enough to become standard practice?
An Experiment in Youth‑Centered Sense‑Making
Our recent engagement was designed to test whether and how we could engage young people in sense‑making in a way that was valuable for them and generated novel insights while limiting the time and other resources required. Here’s what it looked like.
Step 1: A Broad Pulse
We began with an open‑ended questionnaire shared with our network of Youth Partners. Rather than optimizing for speed or easy quantification, we drafted questions that invited reflection about the experiences, concerns, and hopes that are especially salient for them right now. The goal was to create space for surprises; opportunities for young people to share something we wouldn’t have thought to ask them about.
134 Youth Partners responded. More importantly, nearly all participants told us the experience felt worthwhile—and many described feeling genuinely heard (we know this because as part of our standard processes, we get feedback from every participant on every activity).
What did we learn from this part of the experiment? This step is already part of our standard offering. It was effective and efficient. No surprises here.
Step 2: Low-Inference Thematic Organizing
Next, the In Tandem team organized responses into four themes:
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Future uncertainty and preparedness
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Intergenerational understanding
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Mental health and well‑being
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Societal and global challenges
At this stage, we worked to avoid drawing too many inferences when identifying themes. The goal was to organize the data to create an accessible starting point for the Youth Partners that would participate in the sense-making activity. While we did use AI for help in identifying themes, we read every response with human eyes and coded responses ourselves. This allowed us to value the time Youth Partners took to respond and make sure the four themes captured most responses without requiring huge inferential leaps.
What did we learn from this part of the experiment? The time-intensive nature of this step means it would require more innovation before we feel confident we’ve really reduced the cost and effort of doing it well.
Step 3: Youth-Centered Sense-Making
Our goal was to learn if we could get high quality reflections on the meaning of the raw data within 2 weeks using an activity that took no longer than 30 minutes for each participant. To that end, we turned each theme into a short “brief” that contained the theme, the relevant descriptive statistics and 15-20 representative quotes. Participating Youth Partners selected one theme and reflected on what felt most important, misunderstood, or missing—acting not as respondents, but as reviewers of their own collective data. Roughly 40 Youth Partners completed the activity over the course of 2 weeks. As with all In Tandem engagements, Youth Partners earned points towards their quarterly stipend.
What did we learn from this part of the experiment? Our infrastructure proved to work well to make this process safe, easy and effective. Within two weeks we received 10 more responses than our minimum target. And the responses were high quality reflections that added to the insights. The vast majority of Youth Partners found the experience worthwhile, reported that they could share openly and honestly, and many emphasized how rare it was to be asked to help make sense of, not just generate, data.
Step 4: Reporting Out
The final step of the process is to use the raw data and Youth Partners’ sense-making data to generate reports on each of the four themes. Those reports will comprise the remainder of this blog series.
What did we learn from the experiment? Stay tuned.
Takeaways so Far
Several parts of this experiment added further validation for what we’ve been learning since we launched in July 2024. We’ve set up an infrastructure that makes it easier and faster to engage young people authentically and generate high-value insights that can be used to improve outcomes.
Part of that is logistics: we’ve removed a large share of the friction involved in finding young people, coordinating engagements and safely sharing usable data from those engagements.
But the bigger innovation involves creating the conditions that enable young people to engage authentically. As one Youth Partner put it recently, “I engage authentically because I know In Tandem has my back.” How we’ve done this is worth a longer blog post, but the basic idea is simple: we treat them the way you treat people that you value.
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We value their privacy and safety, so we set high standards for protecting their data and make it easy for them to connect with resources if they need them.
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We value their agency, so all activities are opt-in.
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We value their time, their effort and the value they are providing to organizations, so we
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coordinate only those engagements where their voices have the potential to change something meaningful,
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create mechanisms for “closing the loop” so they learn what changed because they participated, and
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provide a non-token stipend based on their participation, and
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constantly and systematically evaluate the degree to which their experience is having the impact they sought when they signed up.
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This all adds up to what we found here: we can efficiently get high-quality responses at high response rates. We can therefore confidently support the first and third steps of the sense-making activity.
We still have open questions about the second step. Our process for turning raw data into something digestible enough to be meaningfully reviewed by Youth Partners was effective, but no more efficient than standard research practices. It therefore doesn’t yet meet our requirement of driving down the friction involved in everything we do. More innovation is needed.
What's Next: Learning in Public
This post is the first in a series based on what we’re learning, both about Young People’s experience and about how we might support something like sense-making at scale. Each of the four themes identified will be explored in its own blog post, using a youth‑centered sense‑making lens to surface nuance, tensions, and questions—not just tidy takeaways.
Along the way, we’ll continue to share what’s working, what’s messy, and what we’re still figuring out. Stay tuned.