Social movements are powerful levers for disrupting and transforming the macro-level structures and institutions that create, maintain, and exacerbate inequalities.1 The civil rights movement led to legal protections for Black voters and dismantled segregated schools and public spaces, transforming political, educational, and social systems across the United States. The gay and lesbian movement secured the right to marriage equality, transforming the institution of the family.
Research about these kinds of changes—changes that uproot the structural and institutional foundations of inequality and shift power hierarchies—are of particular interest to the William T. Grant Foundation (Gamoran, 2021). Our funding supports studies of policies, programs, and practices that reduce inequalities for young people ages 5-25 in the United States. As part of this interest, the Foundation encourages research on larger social forces, like social movements, that can transform the macro-level systems and institutions that shape youth lives.
Social science research has produced a rich body of literature on how the practices, programs, and policies of youth-serving systems—including justice, housing, child welfare, mental health, education, and the labor market—yield unequal opportunity and outcomes. The over-policing of low-income communities of color leads to disproportionate rates of incarceration for Black youth and young adults. Exclusionary and harsh anti-immigration laws engender and exacerbate negative mental health outcomes among Latinx youth, undocumented or not. Racial and economic residential segregation and disinvestment in low-income communities of color perpetuate a history of unequal educational opportunities and outcomes in schools. Bans on discussing sexual identity in the classroom and the dismantling of legal protections for LGBTQ+ individuals negatively impacts the mental health and well-being of sexual and gender minority youth. Yet, as always, people resist—rising up to collectively push back against forces that seek to repress, destroy, and divide. Drawing from and building on the research on institutionalized inequalities, social movement scholarship can help us understand how collective action can change systems to improve the lives of young people.
This essay seeks to encourage applications that propose to examine whether and how social movements can shift institutions in ways that reduce youth inequalities by race, ethnicity, immigrant origin, economic standing, or sexual and gender minority status. It asks researchers to creatively and rigorously tackle the methodological challenges central to research on movement outcomes. It puts social movement scholarship in conversation with Foundation-funded studies on reducing inequality in youth outcomes to offer potential pathways for developing proposals aligned with our funding interests. Finally, this essay offers guidance for what a strong proposal that seeks to take on these challenges might look like.
What are social movements, and how do they bring about change?
Social movements are the sustained mobilization of organized groups with shared goals that seek to bring about or resist social, political, economic, or cultural change (Amenta & Polletta, 2019; Snow, Soule, & Kriesi, 2004; Tarrow, 2012). Social movements are, at least to some degree, extra-institutional in that they are initiated by individuals who are not decision-makers in an established system, and use some element of non-institutionalized tactics, or actions that are not “normatively sanctioned” (Snow et al., p. 6). That said, movements can also emerge from within a system by members who seek to change the status quo, but again, the effort must be organized, sustained, and challenging to those in power (Katzenstein, 1999; Han & Barnett-Loro, 2018).
Drawing from and building on the research on institutionalized inequalities, social movement scholarship can help us understand how collective action can change systems to improve the lives of young people.
As Guigni (1998, p. 373) notes, the “ultimate end of social movements is to bring about change,” and researchers, primarily sociologists and political scientists, have attempted to answer the question of whether and how they do so. Central to this question, as noted by Amenta et al. (2010, p. 289), is “the nature of the outcome,” variously termed impacts, consequences, and/or influences throughout movement literature (Amenta & Polletta, 2019). While some research has focused on the biographical or individual consequences of movement participation (McAdam, 1989; Munson, 2008), we are most interested in studies that that examine whether and how movements transform the macro-level structures and institutions that in turn affect youth lives, such as the education system, the child welfare system, the criminal legal system, the labor market, or family and child policy.
Much of the research examining how movements bring about macro-level change has focused on political outcomes, such as policy changes or the inclusion of movement organizations or actors in the political process, in large part because most movements “[seek] to alter power deficits and to effect social transformation through the state by mobilizing regular citizens for sustained political action” (Amenta et al, 2010, p. 288; see also Francis, 2014). For example, the civil rights movement organized disenfranchised Black citizens throughout the South to gain political power through voter registration (Button, 1989; Morris, 1986; McAdam, 1999; Payne, 1995; Andrews, 2004). Movements may also seek to change cultural, economic, and other systems or organizations (Van Dyke, Soule, & Taylor, 2004; Earl, 2004). Civil rights activists throughout the South targeted segregated businesses through sit-ins and economic boycotts (Biggs & Andrews, 2015). In addition to seeking legislative changes, the women’s movement and the LGBTQ+ movement have also been associated with cultural changes, or “new identities, categories, criteria of moral worth, and forms of knowledge” (Amenta & Polletta, 2019, p. 281) such as the building of new communities (Staggenborg, 1998) and collective identities (Armstrong, 2002; Taylor & Whittier, 1992).
Studies in this tradition identify a range of factors both internal and external to social movements that are associated with positive movement outcomes. Internal factors include things like organizational strength (Gamson, 1990; Guigni, 1998; Morris, 1986), organizational forms (Gamson, 1990), leadership (Gans & McKenna, 2019; Han, McKenna, & Oyakawa, 2021), tactics (Gamson, 1990; Guigni, 1998; Piven & Cloward 1979; Tarrow, 2012), and the nature of movement demands (Gamson, 1990). External factors include political opportunities, or the conditions of political receptivity in the targeted polity, such as receptivity to movement demands or divisions among political elites (McAdam, 1999; Tarrow, 2012). Other work captures the interplay of internal and external factors in studies of political mediation (Amenta, Carruthers, & Zylan, 1992) and local movement infrastructure (Andrews, 2004.) Research taking a more cultural bent has focused on factors like framing processes (Ferree, 2003; McCammon et al., 2007), identities (Rupp, Taylor, & Miller, 2016; Taylor and Whittier, 1992), discourse (Woodly, 2022) and other meaning-making processes (Armstrong & Crage, 2006; Armstrong, 2002).
Scholars have used a range of methodological approaches, like event history analysis and comparative case studies, to examine social movement outcomes. At the same time, social movement researchers have also long acknowledged the difficulties of this work (Amenta & Polletta, 2019; Andrews and Gaby, 2015; Earl, 2000). Guigni (1998, p. 385) summarizes these methodological challenges as follows: “the problem of causal attribution, the problem of time reference and effect stability, the problem of movement goal adaptation, the problem of interrelated effects, and the problem of unintended and perverse effects.” Establishing that changes in politics, culture, and other societal institutions can be attributed to a social movement alone—or that they wouldn’t have happened without social movement mobilization—is a significant challenge. This challenge is exacerbated by the reality that movements rarely have an immediate impact. Rather, “movements promote their programs cumulatively over months and even years of claim-making” (Guigni,1998, p. 385). Social movements can also bring about both intended and unintended changes (Amenta & Polletta, 2019). Simply put, they can bring about change related to intended goals, such as the enforcement of the Brown decision and the desegregation of schools, but they can also yield consequences they did not intend, including backlash like the creation of private academies for White students (Andrews, 2002).
Researchers have also described data limitations as a central challenge in studying movement outcomes (Amenta et.al, 2010). For example, one challenge in social movement research is the operationalization of the social movement itself. Social movements are often composed of a myriad of organizations and protest events, sometimes interconnected and sometimes not. Thus, simply measuring the movement often requires intensive data collection, such as documentation of protests events (Earl et al., 2004) or organizational strength (Andrews, 1997).
The literature cited above, largely from the disciplines of sociology and political science, yields the following general theory of change: social movements, through a combination of internal and external factors, can lead to intended or unintended outcomes, including transformation in political, cultural, economic, and social institutions. The critical additional piece, from the interest of this Foundation, is how those intended or unintended consequences reduce inequalities for young people, or improve outcomes for a group of young people who have been marginalized, excluded, or harmed by unequal conditions or opportunities. In other words, what is the evidence or compelling rationale that the change will positively benefit youth? A representation of this extension of the theory of change, seen from a lens focused on reducing youth inequalities, can be illustrated as:
Researchers might adapt this general framework to develop studies that align with our interests and answer important empirical and theoretical questions about how to shift macro-level structures in ways that improve the lives of young people. Movements might be adult- or youth-led; the critical dimension is that the mobilization is poised to change institutions in ways that reduce youth inequalities. That said, as noted by Earl and others (Earl, Maher, & Elliot, 2017; Maher & Earl, 2017), studies of social movements have not given due attention to the important role of young people in generating social change, and we would argue that they also have not fully attended to how social movements can transform institutions in ways that benefit young people. In terms of focusing on youth, researchers will have a strong foundation to build upon from scholars like Earl, Cohen (2010), Kirshner (2014), and Terriquez (2015), who have lifted up the important role young people can play in generating systemic change.
What can potential applicants learn from grants previously funded by the Foundation?
Since the Foundation called for research on social movements as a strategy to target macro-structural inequalities that affect youth outcomes (Irons & Tseng, 2019), we have funded one study that directly takes on this challenge and welcome others. Tormos-Aponte and Reynolds-Stenson (2021) are conducting a mixed-methods study to examine the association between Black Lives Matter (BLM) mobilization, police reforms, and reductions in police-caused deaths, particularly among Black youth. They are using event-history analysis to examine the relationship between local levels of BLM mobilization and three policy adoption outcomes: whether any reforms were adopted; how many reforms were adopted; and which specific reforms were adopted. They will then examine the relationship between police reform and subsequent changes in local police-caused deaths; they will also conduct a mediation analysis to examine the direct effect of protest on police-caused deaths as well as the indirect effect through police reforms. These quantitative analyses will control for additional factors that may affect the outcomes, such as population size, racial demographics, and political climate. Tormos-Aponte and Reynolds-Stenson will draw from these findings to conduct four case studies to explore potential mechanisms that explain observed associations. The structural change here, of course, is that activists demanded changes in policing practices and policies to protect Black lives, a change intended to reduce disproportionate rates of violence and harmful outcomes among young Black men in particular.
Movements might be adult- or youth-led; the critical dimension is that the mobilization is poised to change institutions in ways that reduce youth inequalities.
We have funded other studies that examine strategies that target the structural foundations of inequality that could be re-imagined as studies of social movement outcomes, with the theory of change, data collection, and analyses extended to account for social movement mobilization. Ayón and colleagues (2020) used quasi-experimental strategies to estimate the effect of sanctuary city policies on the mental health (Nieri et al., 2022) of Latinx children and their parents in California by immigrant origin status and authorization status. These policies have roots in the sanctuary movement of the 1980s (Smith, 1996), which sought to protect migrants fleeing civil unrest in Central America during the Reagan presidency. More recently, the Foundation awarded a grant to Shi and colleagues (2021) to use quasi-experimental approaches to examine whether early life exposure to the Voting Rights Act, as well as increased Black representation in local government in the 1980s, reduced long-term educational and economic inequalities between Black and White children. Certainly, the Voting Rights Act is often referenced as one of the most consequential impacts of the Civil Rights Movement, and thus is the underlying force of the theory driving Shi’s study. Finally, we funded Tuck and colleagues (2021) to conduct a qualitative study to explore how Indigenous youth reconnect to the land through an education program developed by the Sogorea Te` Land Trust after the return of land to the Ohlone community by the mayor of Oakland in 2019. Here, the return of land could be connected to the Land Back movement, which seeks to return colonized lands to Indigenous people, disrupting years of land dispossession, a structural root of inequality (Community-Based Global Learning Collaborative, N.D.). Each of these examples of structural change could potentially be linked, both narratively and methodologically, to social movement mobilization.
Social movement researchers could turn to our portfolio of awarded grants for other examples of how our studies center questions that focus on reducing youth inequalities through rigorous research. One mixed-methods study, led by Lenhoff (2024), is examining how the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Choice Neighborhood Initiative might disrupt the legacy of systemic racial discrimination in housing policy and its subsequent negative effects on educational outcomes by shifting social networks and cohesion in ways that improve outcomes for Black youth from low-income families. During the pandemic, Lowenhaupt and colleagues (2019) worked with six school districts across the country to identify promising practices for supporting immigrant youth and their families in contexts of fluctuating federal, state, and local policies. Another study, led by Woods-Jaeger (2024), seeks to understand how Black youth experience a youth participatory action research intervention intended to mitigate the harmful mental health effects of structural and interpersonal racism.
The unifying thread in our reducing inequality focus area is the examination of how malleable levers can be altered to reduce inequalities in youth outcomes. Whatever the methodological approach—randomized-controlled trial, longitudinal qualitative research, quasi-experimental design—the focus is on examining change. Scholarship on social movement outcomes is poised to do this important work.
What would strong proposals on social movement outcomes look like for our Foundation?
To examine how applicants might fit the study of social movement outcomes within the Foundation’s funding interests, let’s take two different issues of significant consequence for young people today: gun violence and legal restrictions on gender-affirming care. Significant mobilization around these issues exists across the United States, with multiple organizations and activists on the ground fighting for changes in laws, culture, and institutional practices. Movements to end gun violence and to protect the rights of gender diverse youth are characterized by significant youth participation and are perhaps more important than ever in today’s political climate. Further, these are areas where we need more research, both to inform academic study but also to identify solutions to improve the lives of young people.
The unifying thread in our reducing inequality focus area is the examination of how malleable levers can be altered to reduce inequalities in youth outcomes. Whatever the methodological approach—randomized-controlled trial, longitudinal qualitative research, quasi-experimental design—the focus is on examining change. Scholarship on social movement outcomes is poised to do this important work.
The first thing applicants in our reducing inequality focus area need to do is establish that outcomes are unequal across one or more of the Foundation’s prioritized dimensions of inequality: race, ethnicity, economic standing, immigrant origin, language minority status, and gender and sexual minority status. Gun violence is the leading cause of death for young people (Center for Gun Violence Solutions, 2024) and disproportionately affects Black and Latinx youth, both through physical harm and through family and community trauma. Legal restrictions on gender-affirming care not only limit transgender young people’s access to health care but also heighten fear, stigma, and discrimination, exacerbating poor mental health outcomes among trans and gender diverse youth (American Sociological Association, 2024). The gun violence prevention movement and the transgender rights movement target these two issues and are characterized by a diverse array of social movement and advocacy organizations, tactics, and framing strategies.
After drawing on existing empirical literature to make the case that outcomes are unequal, an applicant would need to establish the case that social movements are likely to result in reduced inequalities. As noted in our application guidance, a social movement may reduce inequalities by seeking change or resisting harmful policies for a specific group of young people (e.g., trans youth) or by taking a universally beneficial approach that would benefit youth who need it most (e.g., the gun violence movement seeks to end or reduce gun violence for all, but would likely have disproportionate benefits for Black male youth). While studies examining the conditions or mechanisms through which movements do this might be able to examine changed youth outcomes, it is unlikely, especially given the time it can take for activism to effect or resist concrete changes. When assessing changes in youth outcomes is not possible given the time frame of a research grant, applicants can offer a convincing theoretical and empirical rationale for how the changes engendered by organizing would likely lead to reduced inequality or improved youth outcomes in the future. For example, a proposal might draw on extant literature to establish that changes in a youth-serving system or policy targeted by a social movement (e.g., punitive discipline in schools) would lead to improve academic outcomes for students of color in the longer term (Warren, 2021).
Regardless of whether a study is able to measure outcomes, the application would need to synthesize findings from scholarship on social movement outcomes with findings from literature on youth inequality to present a strong theory of change. Social movement literature tells us that certain factors or conditions can increase the likelihood that a movement will be successful in achieving its goals: political opportunity, divided elites or allied elites, strong internal organization, culturally resonant framing, coalitional structures, effective leadership, disruptive tactics, movement lawyering, and more. Research on youth inequalities documents the structural reasons for and consequences of inequality, and a growing field of researchers are also producing studies on effective strategies for reducing those inequalities. By bridging these literatures, researchers can build compelling theoretical rationales for how, why, or when social movements might lead to changes that shift macro-level institutions in ways that improve youth lives.
For the case of gun violence, existing research documents the structural and socio-cultural reasons why gun violence disproportionately impacts Black boys and young men (Bottiani, Camacho, Lindstrom Johnson, & Bradshaw, 2021). There is also a significant literature that explores and even tests the effects of gun violence prevention strategies and policies (Bragaet al., 2024; Bhatt et al., 2024). Drawing from these literatures could establish a strong evidence base for factors that would need to shift to reduce gun violence and its harmful outcomes for Black youth. Literature on the gun violence prevention movement could provide insights into what framing strategies resonate with activists and targeted elites and how activists envision positive movement outcomes (Bernstein 2022; McMillian & Bernstein, 2022). A study might examine how gun violence prevention activists build organizational strength at the local or state level to advocate for policies or elect gun-sense politicians to political office. Research might also examine how the framing of gun violence prevention compels elected officials to act or how disruptive versus non-disruptive tactics are related to the implementation of policies meant to curb gun violence at the local level. Another study might take on the questions of whether elected officials are more receptive to changing mindsets when large numbers of youth are mobilized. As mentioned above, current grantees Tormos-Aponte and Reynolds Stenson hypothesize that cities with greater BLM mobilization are more likely to have instituted police reforms that are associated with reduction in police-caused deaths, especially for Black youth. A similarly structured study might examine, for example, the association between gun violence prevention mobilization in large US cities, gun-sense legislation, and reductions in youth deaths by gun violence.
To examine social movements as a means to shift the structural foundations of inequality that affect trans- and gender-diverse youth, an applicant would need to ground their theory of change in literature that identifies how societal and cultural institutions create and exacerbate negative outcomes. Existing literature demonstrates the relationship between structural factors—like policies that prevent trans youth from participating in sports or using restrooms to policies that ban gender-affirming case—and negative mental health outcomes (Wittlin, Kuper, & Olson, 2023). While the body of evidence on interventions to improve outcomes for trans and gender-diverse youth (American Sociological Association, 2024) is nascent but growing (Chen et al., 2023; Pullen Sansfaçon et al., 2020; Riggle et al., 2010), research on factors underlying negative mental health outcomes points to policies and cultural attitudes that likely need to shift to reduce inequalities between trans and gender diverse youth and their cisgender peers. Researchers might ask how coalitions between social movement organizations and medical associations, for example, work together to support the passage of legislation to protect trans youth or resist legislation that bans gender-affirming care. A study might examine how state-level political opportunity structures vary in their openness and responsiveness to mobilization on behalf of trans youth; another might examine “movement-lawyering” as a strategy to shift local politics.
Research on youth inequalities documents the structural reasons for and consequences of inequality, and a growing field of researchers are also producing studies on effective strategies for reducing those inequalities. By bridging these literatures, researchers can build compelling theoretical rationales for how, why, or when social movements might lead to changes that shift macro-level institutions in ways that improve youth lives.
Finally, a proposal would need to demonstrate how the research design would provide a rigorous examination of the kinds of processes outlined in the preceeding two paragraphs. The Foundation is open to research methods of all kinds, as one can see by browsing our awarded grants archive, but the research design must be commensurate with the questions asked. Reviewers will look for enough details about the methods in a letter of inquiry—or, if invited, a full proposal—to inspire confidence that the study will shed light on the conditions or mechanisms through which social movements reduce youth inequalities or lead to changes that are expected to reduce inequalities. Researchers should provide a rationale for all research design choices and explain how key concepts and processes will be measured. How will you measure movement strength, for example? How will you identify changes or shifts in institutions? What is the rationale for the sampling strategy? As noted above, methodological challenges are inherent in the effort to attribute societal change to social movements. Applicants should be straightforward not only about the empirical questions they can ask and answer, but also about the limitations of the proposed design. One caution is that applicants should attend carefully to the difference between methods that can generate causal evidence (e.g., quasi-experimental approaches) and those that are limited to correlational claims (e.g., regression analysis). It may be that mixed-methods designs led by interdisciplinary teams are most likely to yield creative, innovative proposals that successfully take on the challenge of examining social movements to reduce youth inequalities, but we look forward to seeing how these fields can speak to one another to produce research useful to both academic and public audiences, especially in these politically turbulent times.
Conclusion
Social movements have demonstrated great promise to challenge power hierarchies, uproot inequitable systems and institutions, and build stronger communities. As we face increasing restrictions on our society’s most vulnerable youth, including youth of color, undocumented and immigrant youth, and LGBTQ+ youth, social movement research holds significant potential to illuminate strategies to transform youth-serving systems and improve youth lives. We hope this essay will encourage strong proposals from social movement scholars that examine how mobilization might provoke systemic changes that reduce youth inequality. Researchers could study movements that are youth- or adult-led—the critical factor is that the mobilization must be poised to disrupt structures that undergird and perpetuate inequalities for young people along the dimensions of race, ethnicity, economic standing, immigrant origin, or sexual and gender minority status.
