Co-Designing Research Priorities in Developmental Neuroscience: A Community-Based Participatory Approach

Children and adolescents, the primary participants in developmental neuroscience research, are rarely consulted or included in the research design process. By neglecting their perspectives and needs, we risk limiting the relevance and effectiveness of translational research that might emerge from such research. Here, we report on a process of co-development with adolescents in the UK city of Bradford to inform the generation of a new developmental neuroimaging research programme. We employed a two-study community-based participatory approach and used mixed methods to identify the research priorities of this community. In the first study, 79 secondary school students from four schools were introduced to fundamental neuroscience concepts during five one-hour workshops. In groups, they then designed research studies, centred around topics they deemed imported, and were asked to present their ideas on posters, role playing as neuroscientists. Reflexive thematic analysis was conducted on these posters, extracting ten key themes. In the second study, 387 students from four schools ranked the ten extracted themes in order of importance. Mental health and stress consistently emerged as the highest priorities across groups. Exploratory analysis revealed that the priority for themes exploring healthy routines and understanding anti-social behaviours varied across schools and the importance of mental health, and topics related to video gaming varied significantly between genders. This work provides an illustration of how a place-based participatory approach can inform the design of developmental neuroscience programmes, improving both equity and translational relevance.