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Information posted by youth in online social media contexts is regularly accessed, downloaded, integrated, and analyzed by academic researchers. The practice raises significant social justice considerations for researchers including issues of representation and equitable distribution of risks and benefits. Use of this type of data for research purposes helps to ensure representation in research of the voices of (sometimes marginalized) youth who participate in these online contexts, at times discussing issues that are also under-represented. At the same time, youth whose data are harvested are subject (often without notice or consent) to the risks associated with this research, while receiving little if any direct benefit from the work. These risks include the potential loss of online social community as well as threats to participant rights and wellbeing. This paper explores the tension between the social justice benefit of representation and considerations that would suggest caution, the latter including inequitable distribution of research-related costs and benefits, and the traditional ethics concerns of participant autonomy and privacy in the context of youth participation in online discussions. In the final section, we propose guidelines and considerations for the conduct of online social media research to assist researchers to balance and respect representational and participant rights or wellbeing considerations, especially with youth.

This article evaluates a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach with mixed methods including concept mapping, q-sorting and deliberative dialogue in the context of a research project on young people’s experiences with digital communications technologies, and addresses some of the central insights of intersectionality theory and praxis. Our approach seeks to ensure that, insofar as possible, the gathered data provide a rich and layered window into the experiences of young people from a range of marginalized communities served by our project partners. The article revisits some key insights and contestations relating to intersectionality and addresses their relationship to our approach. We evaluate whether these methods enhance understandings of the interactions of structures of subordination with other factors identified in intersectionality scholarship, as well as the extent to which they centre the knowledge and expertise of those subordinated by matrices of domination as discussed by authors such as Crenshaw and Hill Collins. Our approach is just one of many that social science researchers interested in advancing intersectionality’s key insights could deploy. While it falls short of full consistency with these insights, its mixed methods work toward our partners’ social justice objectives while facilitating exploration of intersecting axes of subordination. Our approach can also help our project recapture the politic at the heart of many intersectional feminist critiques, such as those of Crenshaw and Hill Collins - that reconceptualizing knowledge requires centring the knowledge and expertise of those traditionally excluded due to interlocking systems of subordination.