"Youth work has not traditionally been viewed as part of the research tradition of the academy and has, too often, despite having a positive impact on young people’s lives, had difficulty in demonstrating its efficacy both to funders and researchers alike. Over the past four years at Wrexham Glyndŵr University we have seen the seeds of change. Academics and practitioners employing different methodologies within the youth work contexts across the UK providing important and powerful insights into the nature and impact of youth work. We approached the editor of The Youth Voice Journal to propose this special edition to capture this emerging work in one place so that practitioners and academics could draw on the methodological developments we had observed. This volume presents six papers that present six different methodological paradigms followed by an example of how the methodological approach was employed in practice, sharing with you some of the outcomes. It is our hope that the information presented here will inspire others to take one of these methodological frameworks and apply it in different youth work contexts and then write about it, sharing this with others. By nature youth work is a creative process and yet this has not necessarily extended in the same way to creativity in measuring outcomes. What these six papers demonstrate is that creativity, when applied to research, has the power to produce insights into youth work practice that are of benefit to all of us working in this field."
 
Keywords: Youth work, Methodology, research, Covid-19