I remember the first time I took part in research. I was 16. A global sportswear brand had hired out a room near a shopping centre in East London. Around a hundred of us were there. We were asked what we thought about the brand, a new trainer, our culture and what people like ‘us’ cared about. At the end, we got £40 or £60 in cash, depending on our age. Then they disappeared.

I never found out whether anything I said shaped a campaign or a product worth millions. What I do remember is that a lot of us spent the money on the very trainers we'd just been asked to critique.

The research industry has come a long way since then. Today, safeguarding, consent, participant welfare and fairer remuneration are rightly taken far more seriously. I rarely see poor practice anymore, and that’s real progress. But my provocation is that protection is the bare minimum. Research can be safe and compliant while still being extractive.

People are asked to give their stories, creativity, cultural knowledge and sometimes even their trauma, but rarely get to shape the process, benefit from the outcome or understand the value they've created. However, research is about deciding whose understanding of the world gets taken seriously, not just collecting answers.

One paper that has shaped my thinking is Why Am I Always Being Researched? by Chicago Beyond. It explores who creates value through research, who benefits from it and whose resources are depleted. Those questions have stayed with me.

In my role, we've worked alongside many of the same young people for years, seeing them through moments of ambition, grief, uncertainty, joy, burnout, transition and reinvention. You start to understand how their identities flex, how their trust is built or broken, and how their relationship with brands and institutions changes as their lives change.

That’s also why I think we need to stop talking about ‘Gen Z’ as though it’s a coherent audience. It has become a catch-all corporate term that makes things easier for organisations, but often flattens the people it is trying to understand.

The fragmentation has already happened. Young people are not moving as one audience, one generation or one shared cultural bloc – their identities and behaviours are shaped by class, race, geography, gender, faith, sexuality, politics, algorithms, digital spaces and lived experience. Those are far more useful lenses than birth year.

When we over-rely on and over-research ‘Gen Z’, we risk producing research that feels neat but doesn't reflect reality.

I've seen campaigns miss the mark because we've over-indexed on generic Gen Z insight. The Department for Education’s collaboration with Gemma Collins is a good example. At a time when graduates were struggling to find work, SEND provision remained critically underfunded and youth services continued to disappear, a light-hearted social campaign from the very institution responsible for young people’s futures landed completely out of step with the mood.

Research may have told you young people enjoy comedic content, but ongoing relationships would have told you that comedy wasn't what they were asking this institution for. They wanted confidence that someone had a plan for their future.

So, what needs to change?

1. Involve the communities you're hoping to understand before the research even begins. Let them help shape the conversation.
2. Close the loop. Show participants what happened because they took part. Research shouldn't feel like shouting into the void.
3. Recognise that cultural knowledge has value. Payment matters, but so do skills, opportunities, credit and long-term relationships.

The best research agencies will stop behaving like insight suppliers and start behaving like cultural infrastructure. They'll invest in communities between briefs, create opportunities beyond research and grow alongside the people they seek to understand. That’s how you build better insight; building relationships that last longer.

The future of ethical research isn't simply about protecting participants while we extract insight from them – it’s building relationships where knowledge, opportunity and value move in both directions.

Alvin Owusu-Fordwuo is co-founder at TAG