Notwithstanding a strong rhetorical commitment to strength-based practices across the human services, the research that supports these services is overwhelmingly deficit-oriented. It begins from a problem identification and proceeds within this vein, evaluating interventions most often though not exclusively externally imposed on populations identified as “at-risk.” It is research that often provides or validates solutions to identified problems. One result of such research is the promotion of practices that achieve predictable outcomes most of the time that we can live with. In this way, deficit-oriented research is not politically neutral. It supports ideologies of efficiency and effectiveness and it underwrites a now well-established, mostly private, for-profit industry of evidence-based practices. It also has the effect of entrenching an expert-driven knowledge generation process, in which good practice becomes secondary to fidelity with research findings. Politically, it positions young people as objects of research initiatives – they are the objects of our truth-finding missions and their self-determination is seldom a central consideration.

There have, over the years, been many attempts to mitigate this political and economic exploitation of young people's circumstances. Participatory research approaches, for example, have sought to enrich expert-driven models by providing agency to young people as knowledge generators in carefully controlled research designs. A range of qualitative research designs have sought to ensure that the voices of young people are reflected in the knowledge generation process through traditional research tools such as interviews, focus groups and youth-based survey instruments. Without a doubt, many researchers in the human service sectors are interested in the real life experiences of young people and try to work with the narratives of young people, albeit always through the expert-driven interpretation and analysis of such narratives.

While research approaches that are designed with democratic impulses in mind can mitigate the exploitative nature of social research in general terms, they do not, in and of themselves, re-orient research to a strength-based value-system. Perhaps a singular exception to the deficit-orientation of human service research has been the resiliency movement, which explicitly seeks to identify how young people succeed in spite of adversity. A positive contribution of resiliency research has been its inherent focus on instances where traditional research approaches forecast deficit but where young people defy such forecast and achieve positive outcomes. It is somewhat unfortunate, however, that the translation of resilience research into practice has been the development of categories and sub-types of personal and social assets followed by implementation strategies that seek to reinforce such assets for young people who seem to be lacking these – in other words, a thoroughly deficit-focused and also normatively loaded approach to get young people back on track in the search for positive outcomes. Missing from most of these approaches is any authentic opportunity for young people to offer their own self-definitions, to frame how they themselves are constructed in the research aims and design.

In reviewing the research literature that comes across our desks through this journal, and the literature we see appear in other journals, we lament just how little we know about what young people living in precarious circumstances do well. We know next to nothing about how young people want to be constructed and represented in the research literature and service sectors. How do they describe their challenges? What strategies do they implement to make sense of their lives? How do they define success in their own lives, related to their own struggles? Specifically, we find it difficult to identify knowledge that captures the micro-successes of young people in navigating social, economic and political challenges they face every day. We believe that as a research community, we have come to construct young people as problem generators and researchers as problem solvers. Young people are interesting to the research community insofar as they, or their environments, are problematic. Normative and affirming experiences of young personhood simply do not gain the attention devoted to those experiences in need of fixing. In this process, we have largely ignored the simple reality that every young person demonstrates strengths every day that are quite remarkable and seem to out-manoeuvre the expert-based knowledge and skill repertoire of professionals.

Examples of such strengths abound, but become visible only if we allow ourselves to step back from our deficit-focused research frameworks. In spite of trauma, resilience deficits, attachment problems, and clinical diagnoses, young people individually and as a group accomplish extraordinary things that even professionals often fail to accomplish: They form ‘families’ consisting of role-based peer dynamics, they negotiate survival strategies at moments of acute threat, they develop identity-frameworks that are inclusive and democratic, and they even invent language and value systems that provide opportunities for participation unrivalled in the institutional participation structures imposed on them. Perhaps most notably, they manage somehow to create moments of happiness and joy where we, as professionals, identify depression and chronic mental health challenges in need of chemical or psycho-therapeutic intervention.

We think that the time is ripe for the development of strength-based research approaches that tackle the successes of young people. Such strengths cannot be identified through the objectification of young people as phenomena of interest. They can only be identified through the immersion of the researcher into the everyday life strategies employed by young people in navigating their social contexts and a curiosity on the part of the researcher not about outcomes but about human relationships. How do queer youth continue to relationally structure their lives at a time when their life circumstances are being appropriated by middle class and mostly dominant race concerns such as same sex marriage, politically neutralized street parades and economically valuable market shares? Given a research literature and practice context that offers queer young people only two possible versions of themselves (doomed victim of rejection and homophobia or superstar honors student and community activist), what happens to the queer youth whose lives position them at neither pole? How are families being reinvented to fit the relational value systems of street-involved youth, particularly in light of research literatures that highlight only the (albeit real) problems of drug addiction, survival sex, and other dangers of street-involvement?

Of course, we are aware that many youth-processes are not desirable when viewed as outcomes. For example, gang culture, sexual exploitation and drug use are ubiquitous in contemporary youth sub-cultures, and serve to create enormous harm. At the same time, we know that these outcomes are, in spite of their destructive nature, reflective of astonishing capacity on the part of young people to develop complex systems of currency (sex and drugs), belonging and community (gangs), and economic and political nationhood (gangs). In many respects, equipped with minimal resources and limited traditional education, young people have re-created many of the institutions, structures and processes of mainstream social orders, but they have done so with their own relational networks in mind. The outcomes are often problematic, not unlike in mainstream society where democratic withering, war and ecological disaster are common and deeply entrenched. But the very fact that they have been able to invent processes that mirror mainstream society is surely indicative of strengths that remain unexplored in deficit-oriented research and untapped in traditional service provision approaches.

There is no limit to the kinds of themes and topics that warrant a strength-based research approach. How do young people form relational networks and processes that run counter to the institutionally imposed control and structure in residential care and treatment? How do they develop social support networks among peers that lack all forms of material resources? How are multiple identities protected and acknowledged in youth sub-cultures in spite of explicit negation and oppression in formal social contexts? How do young people negotiate transitions between life phases that fall between the cracks of fragmented public service systems?

We believe that as a research community, we have only scratched the surface of capacity, strength, and opportunity within young people's communities and networks. And we believe that engaging youth processes and relational approaches might not only improve our ability to be helpful, but might even give us some ideas about how to approach the embedded challenges, and sometimes entrenched injustices, in our mainstream societal orders.