By Louca-Mai Brady,
We had our last Herts YPAG meeting of 2022, and the third in person, on Saturday 3rd December, and as it was December we had a Christmas theme 🎄🎅.
We started off an update from Julia, a researcher from the University of Hertfordshire, about the project she’s involved in on problematic use of internet by young people.
Then we played a game where we talked about what it feels like to share private information to strangers, and what researchers need to tell young people to help them feel safe about sharing information. 
Next, we talked to another researcher – Rebecca – about a project she’s planning about how children and young spend money on food and drink. She also asked us about what form of data collection we preferred (online or a paper diary). I liked how she was asking us for our own personal opinions. Rebecca said:
We are designing a research project on children’s and young people’s food spending. Both food and spending are fairly tricky topics to research, because they can be quite personal and also quite difficult to remember or ‘recall’. Some projects have used diary methods to record everyday expenditure. We wanted to try out a couple of versions of these – a paper diary and an app. The group were really engaged and had lots of helpful insights. One important thing that we learned was that children and young people were more worried about their parents than ‘big tech’ knowing about their food spending habits, so preferred the online diary as they felt that it was more ‘private’ than a paper one. But the group felt it was important to offer children and young people a range of options. We will draw on these insights in developing our proposal and hope to come back to the YPAG in the future to discuss further questions about how to involve young people in the project.
After that, we had some amazing pizza 🍕and a cake for a YPAG member’s birthday 🎂, and had a chance to chat with each other.
We then talked to Terry about creating animation about our group and had lots of fun making some! Also, we took a vote for our new logo, which we’d worked with Terry to design and at an earlier meeting. These are the two you’ll be seeing more of:
Then we had a Christmas party, which Louca-Mai planned with some of the YPAG members. One of them made an amazing ‘poke a tree’ game with prizes and we had a gingerbread house-making competition in teams! A great end to the first year of Herts YPAG 2.0 🥳
Katie wrties about getting actively involved in developing an MRC study of adolescent health
A short, 1 minute animation produced by Cancer Research UK, explaining the term ‘randomised trial’
This exercise develops knowledge of different types of research and related terminology. The task requires young people to match a phrase with its definition.
