Phase 1: Team Establishment and Capacity Building

Central to the Bipolar Youth Action Project was the establishment of the Youth Action Group, a group of young adults aged 20 to 25 years living with bipolar disorder, who served as peer researchers for the duration of the project. The BDSBC recruited 12 youth by advertising the project within their community network and interviewing prospective members, with the expectation that there would be some attrition over the study’s 2-year span. The recruitment process and inclusion criteria were the same as in the prefunding phase, with the addendum that members of the Youth Action Group must also be able to complete a 2.5-hour research ethics course (the Tri-Council Policy Statement Course on Research Ethics). Two “Co-Leads” self-selected to take on the additional responsibilities of governance and leadership of the Youth Action Group. The wider project team consisted of an academic researcher specializing in community-based participatory research in bipolar disorder, the Executive Director of the BDSBC, a specialist from an organization dedicated to youth engagement, health care providers (two psychiatrists who were coapplicants on the funding application and one mental health counselor), and a research coordinator.

A series of four foundational training sessions were conducted with Youth Action Group members to build capacity. The sessions were focused on: the principles and implementation of community-based participatory research; qualitative, quantitative and graphic facilitation methods; research ethics and knowledge translation; and providing a grounding in CREST.BD’s previous research exploring self-management in adults with bipolar disorder (see Table 1).

Phase I research training events.

^aYAG: Youth Action Group.

^bThe Tri-Council Policy Statement Tutorial Course in Research Ethics (Government of Canada Panel on Research Ethics, 2016).

^cCBPR: community-based participatory research.

Graphic facilitation, or graphic recording, is a process of illustrating themes and ideas shared during discussions using a combination of text and imagery, typically on a whiteboard or large sheet of paper [35]. The rationale for training Youth Action Group members in graphic facilitation was twofold. First, it was a means of knowledge translation of findings from CREST.BD’s research into adult self-management, as group members were tasked with visualizing previous findings as the academic team presented them. Second, introducing graphic facilitation to group members provided training in a knowledge translation method that could be utilized at the research forums.