Our Approach

We take steps to understand who we are, our assumptions, our beliefs and our experiences and how these aspects influence the research process.

We engage youths; families/carers; Indigenous partners; partners in the health and social services, non-profit and philanthropic sectors; community members; and policymakers in conceiving and implementing research and disseminating and translating its findings. We employ different approaches for stakeholder engagement depending on the project and stakeholder preferences (e.g., community-based participatory research, arts-based participatory methods, co-design, patient preference modeling, collecting data from and about patients, families, clinicians, and programs/systems, etc.). No matter which approaches we use, they are centred on relationships, reciprocity, and respect. To facilitate engagement, we invest time (e.g., meetings during evenings as youth often prefer this, staff time to meet and support stakeholders) and resources (e.g., honorariums for patient and family partners, funds for community sites).

Our work uses diverse quantitative, qualitative, mixed, arts-based and other methods. See our research projects and publications sections for examples.

We care deeply about and enjoy mentoring and training undergraduate and graduate students, research-track residents, postdoctoral fellows, young scientists, and research personnel. Click here to know more.

You read that right! Fun, food, friendship, laughter, collaboration, connection, community, celebrating our diversity, mentorship, support, and an emphasis on growth and well-being are an important part of who we are as a team. Do check our pictures out!

 As a team, we seek to continuously learn and improve. In our work, we promote a learning health system approach which brings health and community networks together to use data, stories, and experiences to continuously identify shared problems, co-design solutions, and improve care, services, and policy.

Our research focuses on designing and testing innovative interventions to address equity gaps in youth mental health. We work in multiple Quebec, Canadian and global contexts, focusing on diverse, underserved youths. We align with open science practices that can advance equity. We act to mitigate systemic barriers to research participation (e.g., inaccessible language) and attend to gender and other intersecting identities (e.g., physical disability, ethnicity, rurality) in the questions we ask, the stakeholders we partner with, the participants we recruit, and in our methods, analysis, and dissemination. We strive to have equitable partnerships in our global work.

We work closely with multiple stakeholders which helps our research match their priorities and result faster in better practice, policy, and outcomes. We also use many approaches to share our research and translate it into real-world impacts such as publications, conferences, print, digital and social media, data visualization, youth-friendly briefs, policy briefs, webinars, training, sharing circles and expressive arts. We support partners and communities in building sustainable and scalable capacities.

Our work often converges lenses from and brings together experts from varied disciplines such as psychology, psychiatry, public health, sociology, social work, anthropology, the arts, geography, and computer science.