Positive Impacts of Adolescent Involvement in Health Research: An Umbrella Review

Despite an increased recognition of the right of adolescents to be involved in decisions that affect them, young people continue to be under-involved in health research. One of the reasons is a lack of awareness among researchers on the current evidence base around the bene fits of involving adolescents. To address this, we conducted an umbrella review to synthesize the evidence on the positive impacts of adolescent involvement in health research. This umbrella review was preregistered with PROSPERO (CRD42021287467). We searched 11 databases, Google Scholar, PROSPERO, reference lists, 10 journals, websites of 472 organizations, and sought input from experts. Ultimately, we included 99 review articles. We found that adolescent involvement has many positive impacts on young people, including increased knowledge and skills; personal development; financial bene fits; career and academic growth; enhanced relationships; and valuing their experience. The positive impacts of adolescent involvement on the research itself include increased relevance of the study to adolescents, improved recruitment, development of more adolescentfriendly materials, enhanced data collection and analysis, and more effective dissemination. Researchers also bene fited from adolescents' involvement through increased knowledge, skills, and a shift in their attitudes. The evidence supporting the positive impacts of adolescent involvement in research is substantial but limited by a lack of rigorous evaluation, inconsistent reporting, and unclear evaluation methods. (c) 2024 Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).