UCLA

Despite decades of specialized attention on the older youth in foster care population, minimal scholarship or policies have directly addressed this population’s wellness experiences and needs (Department of Health and Human Services, 2008; 2017). To address this gap, our research collective, which consists of former foster youth, artists, non-profit leaders, and researchers, designed and implemented a hybrid qualitative study. This study aimed to provide older foster youth in care with the opportunity to rewrite and reright (Smith, 2012) wellness by collectively depicting the manner older youth in care define and experience wellness. Our methodological approach was driven by the principles and praxis of youth participatory action research (YPAR) and combines the methods of photovoice and constructivist grounded theory. It included gathering and analyzing multiform data, such as intensive individual interviews, photos, creative writing, and polylogues, and conducting simultaneous data analysis. We recruited fifteen youth between the ages of 18 and 26 who were actively or formerly involved with the child welfare system to join our collective and participate in participatory data gathering and analysis. In addition, I conducted analysis on all data elements under the advisement of the other collective members. Principal findings offer a youth-driven definition of wellness as an individualized and evolving phenomenon but consistently include the following components: social, physical, emotional, self-mastery, survivalist, and spiritual wellness. Study findings make a significant contribution to social welfare scholarship through building youth-driven knowledge on the definitions and experiences of wellness of older youth in care, expanding the theoretical canon of knowledge, and expanding the methodological knowledge base on the implementation of YPAR with older youth in care. Additionally, findings can be used to reimagine services provided to older youth in foster care.