Listening to Our Future: Early Findings From the Health Foundation's Young People's Future Health Enquiry
The Centre for Youth Impact
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
This report presents the findings from the engagement exercise of the Health Foundation's young people's future health inquiry - a first-of-its-kind research and engagement project.
Authors M Kane and J Bibby
Published by Health Foundation, (2018)
The two-year inquiry (2017-19) aims to discover whether young people currently have the building blocks for a healthy future; what support and opportunities young people need to secure them; the main issues that young people face as they become adults; and what this means for their future health and for society more generally. Clearly, the scope of the inquiry is much broader than just youth work but the findings are relevant for anyone supporting young people through their transition to adulthood.
Engagement exercise
The exercise engaged young people living in the UK aged 22 to 26 to explore the factors that helped or hindered them in their transition to adulthood. The engagement exercise adopted a mixed methods and iterative approach including a 10-person reference panel, social media analysis, analysis of the 2017 Next Steps dataset (approximately 7,700 respondents), mobile app diaries, five workshops (80 participants in total) and four "Google Hangouts" with young people. In addition, an online survey of 2,000 young people was commissioned. The findings were then compared and contrasted with existing research evidence.
Assets for health
Within the engagement exercise young people identified four assets that are central to their life experiences:
- Appropriate skills and qualifications, including technical requirements of employment
- Personal connections, including confidence in themselves and strong social networks
- Financial and practical support, including housing and childcare
- Emotional support, especially someone to talk openly and honestly with.
Youth work can support young people across each area but its potential role was most apparent within emotional support. In particular, the findings backed up wider evidence, which suggests the complex interplay between emotional support, relationships, wellbeing and long-term health. Within this complex mix of issues, the importance of support for emotion management, guidance and modelling from a trusted adult was identified by both young people and existing evidence.
Four experiences
In conjunction with young people, researchers developed four "groups" with varying mixes of the assets they need for a healthy future:
- Starting ahead and staying ahead
- It's not what you know, it's who you know
- Getting better together
- Struggling without a safety net.
Youth work can support young people from each of these groups but their value was most clearly articulated for those getting better together. Often this group were moving on from previous challenges with "a turning point often due to social support or intervention from others, such as a formal or informal mentor".
Implications for practice
The research takes a broad look at young people's lives but the implications for youth work are clear.
- The research adds substantial detail to understanding of the context within which young people find themselves, characterised by new levels of complexity, uncertainty and insecurity.
- It is both based on and bolsters the view that adolescence is a unique developmental phase that, arguably, requires specific and specialist support.
- Although the focus is on individual assets, an important framing of the research is that the long-term health of the population is one of the greatest assets of our society - crucial for many community-based programmes.
- The interrelation and importance of all four assets provides a useful framework for articulating the distinctive role of youth work and offers it a clear location within the broader landscape of young people's lives.
The Centre for Youth Impact is a community of organisations that work together to progress thinking and practice around impact measurement in youth work and services for young people.
This article is part of CYP Now's special report on Youth Work Impact. Click here for more