In her essay on the potential role of social movements in reducing youth inequalities, Jenny Irons (2025) lays out a critical research opportunity.1 In this essay, I draw on over a decade of research by myself and collaborators, and a global body of scholarship on youth political engagement, particularly youth engagement in social movements, to highlight the additional potential of social movements research that treats young people as agents of change, not just as beneficiaries of change. My ultimate argument is that studying young people’s political agency both produces cutting edge scholarship and helps to counteract an anti-youth narrative known as the youth deficit model, which itself produces substantial harm to young people (Maher, Johnstonbaugh, & Earl 2020; Maher & Earl, 2021).
Young people and social movements
To make this argument, it’s best to start with a reminder about the power of youth political agency and action. If you look at almost any social movement that is making progress today, young people are playing major roles. Consider that critical importance of young people’s creativity, bravery, and action in the Black Lives Matter movement (Dohrn & Ayers, 2016), immigration reform movements (Burciaga & Martinez, 2017; Fiorito, 2019; Terriquez, 2015), climate activism (Boulianne, Lalancette, & Ilkiw, 2020) and anti-gun violence activism (Bent, 2020). Youth protesters in the Black Lives Matter movement catalyzed debates over police reform; Parkland survivors changed the gun safety debate; DREAMERs fundamentally altered the immigration debate; groups like the Sunrise Movement, aided by countless school walkouts and global influences like Greta Thunberg, have transformed concerns about climate change into a global action plan to address the climate crisis. Looking around the world, the same is true elsewhere, too (Tai, 2019; Watts, 2018).
This isn’t new: young people have long been a core group of participants in, and leaders of, social movements. Young people were confronting tanks in Tiananmen (Lui, 2000; Zhao, 2001) before they were confronting tear gas in Hong Kong. Young people were sitting in at lunch counters in support of the civil rights movement in the late 1950s and in Greensboro in 1960 (Morris, 1981) before they were leading marches in support of Black Lives Matter. Young people were fighting against the war in Vietnam (Fendrich, 2003) before they were at odds over the war in Gaza. High schools (Kwako et al., 2023) and especially college campuses (Dixon, Tope, & Dyke 2008; Munson, 2010a; Munson, 2010b; Van Dyke, 1998; Van Dyke 2003; Van Dyke, 2014) have been hotbeds of activism. In short, young people play a critical role in challenging and changing institutionalized inequalities.
The youth deficit model
It is also important to realize that many within and outside of the academy think of the examples I just gave as exceptions to an otherwise quiescent rule. Those naysayers see young people as beneficiaries of the political agency of elders, seeing only elders as having the capacity to lead the way to a better tomorrow. Academics have helped underwrite that narrative. When Putnam (2000) claimed that almost half of the reduction in civic engagement from 1945 and 2000 was due to generational change (Putnam, 2000, p. 284), it set off a wave of studies (Delli Carpini, 2000; Easterlin & Crimmins, 1991; Mann, 1999; Rahn & Transue, 1998; Wilkins, 2000) and an academic and public panic about youth political disengagement. Psychological researchers fanned this panic by fretting over the capacity of young people to be responsible political actors given that their brains were still developing (for a discussion and criticism, see Bessant, 2008).
Young people have long been a core group of participants in, and leaders of, social movements.
Taken together, young people are trying to free themselves from “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” political quicksand. This double bind is also at the heart of what Osler and Starkey (2003) have referred to as the youth deficit model, or what Checkoway (1998) has called the youth-as-victim model in youth studies and social work. In essence, the youth deficit model represents the widespread belief that young people are lacking politically in comparison to prior generations (Protzko & Schooler, 2019), which is paradoxical because young people are imagined to be inactive but also incorrectly active. The deficit model valorizes traditional forms of political engagement (e.g., voting) over more non-institutional forms of engagement (e.g., social movement participation). It often heaps criticism on young people about their political skill (as older civil rights activists did when they tried to warn young people off engaging in what they saw as politically dangerous sit-ins, or as older activists do now when they issue blanket indictments of the use of digital and social media in activism). The deficit model also assumes that young people cannot be, or even learn to be, politically effective on their own, arguing that political change, including social movement outcomes, will never owe to youth political agency and action.
The deficit model understands young people as adults-in-training who lack unique points of views and relationships to issues, which means it also fails to understand the way in which age is part of an intersectional identity (e.g., older Black women may not have the same interests and concerns as Black girls or young Black women) and also a source of inequality in its own right (Maher & Earl, 2021). It pretends that what young activists need support in is fundamentally different from what older activists may need, despite the fact that “many of the actual issues that youth face in getting politically involved and being successful in pressing their agendas are also faced by people of other ages, such as evaluating the quality of information…, figuring out models of influence…, [and] finding time to get involved…” (Earl, 2020). The deficit model is abetted by systematic media inattention to youth political engagement (Giugni & Grasso, 2020) and to the myriad of inequalities that young people face that make action difficult to undertake.
To be sure, scholars have roundly criticized the deficit model (Bloemraad & Trost, 2008; Saunders, 2009; Yates & Youniss, 1999) and laid bare its empirical weakness (see Earl, Maher, & Elliott, 2017, for a review). For instance, subsequent research shows solid and consistent evidence of young people’s active role in social movements (Dalton, 2009; Earl, Maher, & Elliott 2017; Jenkins et al., 2016) despite the many obstacles placed in their way. Those obstacles include deficit model beliefs leaking into allegedly youth-focused organizations (Gordon & Taft, 2011; Gordon, 2009) and inattention to young people in most movement mobilization drives (Elliott & Earl, 2018; Elliott & Earl, 2019), among other impediments. Research has shown what an active role young people have in their own political socialization (Yates & Youniss, 1999). In fact, research on youth agency and impact is a thriving area, with researchers all around the world focused on the importance and impact of young people’s engagement in social movements.
Research on beneficiaries or agentic youth
We’re now ready to bring these threads together to consider how young people are implicated in scholarship working to uncover what (or who) drives effective solutions to inequalities faced by young people. I argue that cutting edge social movement research and research that itself helps to undermine youth inequalities is most likely to come from scholarship that is thoughtful about whether it implicitly or explicitly challenges or abets the deficit model. Research that notices young people and studies their agency represents a core challenge to the deficit model, whereas research that treats young people as only beneficiaries or erases youth contributions to change risks abetting the deficit model.
More specifically, a youth agency approach to studying social movement outcomes centers young people’s perspectives, priorities, experiences, and actions. For instance, a youth agency approach would focus on identifying issues that young people prioritize, versus issues selected as important by elders. Likewise, a youth agency approach would examine how young people use their agency to forward efforts for change. This may involve studying young people’s actions in social movements—for instance, school walkouts or youth-created and led groups—and, to the extent that elders are studied, studying how adults have worked as allies to young people. (Please notice my intentional use of ally, which implies that young people are leading and adults are supporting.) Understanding the impact of, and how to support, youth political efforts is a critical move to deeply countering a deficit model in research and understanding how inequalities that young people care about get addressed.
A youth agency model is compatible with a variety of research methods, including quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research. Quantitative research could involve traditional data collection methods like surveys and/or protest event research (where data on protests is collected and analyzed quantitatively). Qualitative research could draw on ethnographic methods, interviews, content analysis, etc. The critical aspect is not the research method so much as the use of any method to center youth perspectives and experiences. This may or may not involve participatory action research as well. In my own research, collaborators and I are interested in tracking and understanding youth participation and youth leadership in social movements as a way of understanding young people’s agendas and the consequences of youth engagement. We have used qualitative and quantitative methods across different projects and have studied a variety of forms of action. We have also explicitly studied young people who may not see themselves as activists, even if they are involved politically.
Understanding the impact of, and how to support, youth political efforts is a critical move to deeply countering a deficit model in research and understanding how inequalities that young people care about get addressed.
There are other approaches that researchers might want to be forewarned have a comfortable relationship with the deficit model. One potentially concerning approach is what I call a guardianship model of social movement outcomes. In this model, young people are not politically active on their own behalf; instead, elders take action to support youth interests as their guardians. While sometimes guardianship may be a good thing (e.g., adult-led efforts to reduce child abuse), guardianship as a model runs the risk of importing deficit-based thinking as it positions adults as defining young people’s interests and young people as passive beneficiaries of adult political engagement. Research on social movement outcomes that looks only at adult-defined and led initiatives to ameliorate inequalities may help reduce some inequalities while it unwittingly abets the deficit model.
A more camouflaged version of a guardianship approach ignores any age differences amongst agentic actors by treating all protesters and social movement participants as ageless (which effectively treats them as “adults”). While tempting, for instance, to just think of “protesters” who are working against gun violence, when one doesn’t explicitly identify young people within an amorphous group of protesters, it risks contributing to the false invisibility of youth contributions (and hence contributes to deficit thinking, however unintentionally). Empirically surfacing youth involvement in social change efforts can be itself an important antidote to deficit thinking and is a much more empowering research model when compared to research that studies the same outcomes but camouflages youth political agency.
Conclusion
In this essay I have summarized research on the historical and contemporary importance of young people to social movements. I have also reviewed the popularity of, and the problems with, the youth deficit model. In my closing section, I hope to prompt reflection on how social movement outcomes research—especially research on the reducing youth inequalities—may be improved and more impactful if it is self-reflexive about how young people are positioned in the research design. Research designs that focus on adult benefactors and passive youth beneficiaries risk contributing to deficit narratives; research designs that camouflage youth engagement within the masses of ageless (or rather assumed to be adult) protesters will also never be able to understand the role of youth political agency in challenging the inequalities that youth face. Research that works to identify youth social movement participation and understand its connection to social movement outcomes has the chance to bring great research gains that may help address some of the most pressing inequalities facing young people today.
