Check out this new interactive website from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) that promotes their 2020 national report on adolescent health. Take a minute to explore the site; it’s full of MyVoice easter eggs! You might be surprised to find your MyVoice text message hidden behind one of their interactive features.
ICYMI: It is the report that used responses from MyVoicers and data analysis from the MyVoice team to provide national recommendations for supporting positive adolescent development.
The report “Promoting Positive Adolescent Health Behaviors and Outcomes Thriving in the 21st Century” recommended that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health (OASH) should focus funding on holistic, evidence-based, population-wide adolescent health programs that consider adolescent risk-taking as a normal part of development and an opportunity for adults to mentor and support healthy risk-taking in adolescence.
For more on what we mean by risk taking, see the NASEM’s brief on Reframing Adolescent Risk: Healthy and Unhealthy Risk Taking and watch the video above.
In August 2019, MyVoice posed a poll question of “Describe what it would look like to live your best life” and questions related to that on its interactive text message platform to young people ages 14-24. A total of 945 unique responses were received. Selected text message responses from MyVoice participants and major themes derived from them were included in the national report.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine partnered with MyVoice to power their national recommendations with youth voices from the MyVoice project
“This report talks about optimizing adolescent health, namely, what would help youth live their best life,” said Tammy Chang, M.D., M.P.H., M.S., family physician and assistant professor at the University of Michigan Medical School, and a co-author on the report. She also founded MyVoice. “We used those narratives to give context to the scientific recommendations to help policy makers understand the lived experience of youth today.”
The report has open the doors to policy briefs, webinar discussions, and commissioned works on youth and media, prevention models, advocacy for youth with disabilities & LGBTQ youth, and more.