The consideration is whether a workshop can be designed and justified as an independent research instrument for generating credible qualitative data in educational research, rather than being treated as an instructional activity or a component of action research. The aim of the talk is to introduce a concrete workshop protocol designed to study adolescents’ urban affordances (students aged 13–15): the opportunities and constraints that young people experience in the city in relation to learning, participation, and agency, with particular attention to their “third places” beyond school and home. The empirical domain functions as a demonstration case.

 My methodological questions for conceptualising the workshop as a research method are:

• Which design components must a research workshop include to function as a standalone instrument?
• Which facilitation strategies support ethical and authentic youth participation?
• How should workshop outputs be documented and analysed?

 For the conceptualisation of the research instrument, I draw on workshop-as-methodology literature. I use workshop typologies (including idea-generating workshops and the future workshop) as design references, and I use the Purpose–Outcomes–Process model to clarify the research purpose, expected outcomes, and the workshop process. The protocol also includes participation safeguards (e.g., anonymity options and structured small-group work).

 The international dimension lies in the transferability of the method: adolescents’ third places and access to urban opportunities are shaped by comparable challenges across cities and villages under conditions of globalisation. For cross-national use, the protocol keeps a stable core (the same prompts, artefacts, and coding approach), while allowing contextual sensitivity to cultural differences (e.g., forms of expression and communication styles).

The product of this work is a complete workshop protocol, together with participation rules and an analysis plan for the collected research materials. The workshop produces specific outputs: mental maps, mind maps, worksheets, and the observation sheet to be completed during the session. These artefacts are treated as primary (real-time) workshop data. The workshop starts with an introduction and group orientation to the topic, followed by participants’ first reflections. Next, the workshop moves into idea generation and the organisation/clustering of ideas. In the final phase, the group works on extracting concrete points from the ideas and formulating proposals for change. For analysis, I consider an iterative cycle: ongoing observation across sessions and reflection on these actions after each workshop, as well as after the full cycle, to trace both meanings and conditions of participation in the data. The workshop protocol is finalised. In line with the doctoral research plan, empirical data collection is scheduled for the following academic year and will start after ethics approval.

The expected outcome is a reproducible methodological blueprint: a complete workshop protocol (steps and prompts), participation rules, and an analysis plan for workshop-generated materials. The contribution is methodological: it shows how a workshop can function as a standalone research instrument for producing credible qualitative data with adolescents, rather than being used only as an instructional format or a component of action research. The instrument is designed for researching adolescents’ urban affordances (13–15 years old), with attention to “third places” beyond school and home. It is expected to support ethical and authentic youth participation by reducing power asymmetries (e.g., through anonymity options and structured small-group work) and by producing multiple data types (mental maps, mind maps, worksheets, observation-based notes). This enables tracing both participants’ meanings and the conditions of participation, and linking ideas and proposals for change to lived experience. Because the protocol keeps a stable core (the same prompts, artefacts, and coding approach), it is designed to be adaptable for cross-national use and to enable context-sensitive yet comparable qualitative data across different settings.

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