Social Research Methods and Research Practices > Social Research Methods
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Young people not participating in education, employment or training (NEET) are a key policy concern in Europe. In this study, we bring forward the idea of hope as a form of life course agency to examine whether hopeful thinking plays a protective role against the risk of being NEET in the context of the British welfare state. Hope is conceptualised as multidimensional: being a temporally embedded, agentic mentality comprised of one’s sense of adaptive decision-making in the present and pathways-thinking towards the future. Longitudinal estimations based on the latest Understanding Society microdata (2009–19) indicate a direct association between higher-hope modes, on average, and a lower likelihood of being NEET. Further, interaction models assess whether hopeful agency is moderated by the experience of parental worklessness. Findings indicate that hopeful agency is shown to be important in the face of NEET risks borne of family background. For the UK, building and ensuring that young people maintain an adaptive, agentic mentality towards their future in education or employment over the long term, may prove one cost-effective policy approach.
Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) is the national longitudinal study of children and young people in the Republic of Ireland and has followed two cohorts for over ten years to date: Cohort '98 who were recruited into the study at age nine years and Cohort '08, recruited at age nine months. The study aims to describe the lives of Irish children and young people in terms of their development, with a view to positively affecting policies and services available for them. Traditionally, data collection involved in-home visits from an interviewer who conducted face-to-face interviews, recorded physical measurements of study participants and administered cognitive assessments. However, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated restrictions, significant adaptations were required to these methods to ensure data collection for the pilot and main fieldwork for Cohort '08 at age 13 could continue to the expected timeline. Face-to-face interviews with participants were replaced with telephone and web-based modes, interviewer training was conducted online, online resources were made available for interviewers and participants and COVID-19 related items were added to questionnaires. In addition to the scheduled data collection, a special COVID-19 survey was also conducted on both GUI cohorts in December 2020 to explore the impact of the pandemic on participants’ lives. This paper outlines the adaptations made to traditional data collection methods in GUI, highlighting the challenges that were met, but also the benefits of some changes that may be worth incorporating into future waves of GUI.
Findings from longitudinal research, globally, repeatedly emphasise the importance of a taking an early life course approach to mental health promotion; one that invests in the formative years of development, from early childhood to young adulthood, just prior to the transition to parenthood for most. While population monitoring systems have been developed for this period, they are typically designed for use within discrete stages (i.e., childhood or adolescent or young adulthood). No system has yet captured development across all ages and stages (i.e., from infancy through to young adulthood). Here we describe the development, and pilot implementation, of a new Australian Comprehensive Monitoring System (CMS) designed to address this gap by measuring social and emotional development (strengths and difficulties) across eight census surveys, separated by three yearly intervals (infancy, 3-, 6-, 9- 12-, 15-, 18 and 21 years). The systems also measures the family, school, peer, digital and community social climates in which children and young people live and grow. Data collection is community-led and built into existing, government funded, universal services (Maternal Child Health, Schools and Local Learning and Employment Networks) to maximise response rates and ensure sustainability. The first system test will be completed and evaluated in rural Victoria, Australia, in 2022. CMS will then be adapted for larger, more socio-economically diverse regional and metropolitan communities, including Australian First Nations communities. The aim of CMS is to guide community-led investments in mental health promotion from early childhood to young adulthood, setting secure foundations for the next generation.
This gives a flavour for the questions you might ask in collaborative interdisciplinary work with young people. It provides an account of a real-life experience of doing collaborative questioning in practice.
This book invites the reader to think about collaborative research differently. Using the concepts of ‘letting go’ (the recognition that research is always in a state of becoming) and ‘poetics’ (using an approach that might interrupt and remake the conventions of research), it envisions collaborative research as a space where relationships are forged with the use of arts-based and multimodal ways of seeing, inquiring, and representing ideas.
The book’s chapters are interwoven with ‘Interludes’ which provide alternative forms to think with and another vantage point from which to regard phenomena, pose a question, and seek insights or openings for further inquiry, rather than answers. Altogether, the book celebrates collaboration in complex, exploratory, literary and artistic ways within university and community research.
In our project, ethnographic methods of participant observation and interviews were infused with arts-based methods of creating artefacts – collaging, impromptu video making, shared text-making, photography; these practices, as they become normalized within our research ethos, served as ‘weirs’ and interrupted the flow of received meanings that are embedded often in the labels ascribed to young people by the systems of schooling and justice. Embodiment is a word that tries to capture what is left of a project. This chapter, even with the inclusion of words, images and a cacophony of form, still offers only a partial glimpse of the affective traces that took root in the circle within us and the one that we draw around us, together.
Enchantment is an important part of research in the everyday. The experience of locating magic and wonder in the everyday language use of participants constituted a kind of moral intervention – the production of an affective orientation that reinforced our commitment to the well-being and progress of the participants in the project.
This piece is an encounter with a school which went wrong, but something was retrieved. It shows how it is important to factor potential failure into collaborative research. It is also about what happens when a team of artists go into a school and work together.
