Young people
tthepeoplepartnership have conducted many projects with young people, often including young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, on a range of topics. These have mostly been in the public sector and in areas where clients are trying to influence young people’s behaviour. Our outputs often focus on understanding how young people are different developmentally and attitudinally and what that means in the context of the research in question.
A flavour of the kinds of projects we have conducted in this area…
a) Development of communication campaigns
When we research communications campaigns, these tend to be aiming to trigger young people to reassess, or give them confidence to change, what might be ingrained attitudes and behaviour that are significantly influenced by the peer group, eg around food, exercise or learning.
Our focus, therefore, is often understanding how successfully communication concepts/routes/executions are achieving their objectives and how they could be optimised.
Discussion groups are a great forum for this – as they are inherently social and generative – and we often exploit this by recruiting pairs of friends to attend. We find that this tends to encourage openness, honesty and creativity – as young people feel more comfortable knowing someone else there – although, of course, fear of peer disapproval can prove inhibiting when talking about some issues. We therefore structure discussions to build young people’s confidence in being part of the group before delving into the research subject.
With sensitive subjects – such as sex – we find that different approaches are often needed for different audiences, depending on personality/confidence levels and the subject in hand. So whilst some groups may be happy to discuss some topics quite openly, others may not and we would normally get around this by talking about subjects indirectly, such as what friends’ or family’s attitudes are to issues. However, in general we think that communication research stimulus often acts as a successful projective in its own right, as attitudes are expressed through responses to the characters/situations/language used in the stimulus.
This means that – as with any audience – the stimulus materials used are key and young audiences quickly pick up on the details of how characters and peers are represented. Often we find that communications are rejected because of the specifics of the perceived personality of a character, their precise words or actions or for what they are wearing. Although this can seem unhelpful in the context of concept development, it is critical executional learning.
Given the preponderance of channels, and young people’s take up of them, we have also found it to be important to be clear about which channels will be used for which executions, as this can significantly influence their appeal and views of their likely relative success.
b) Understanding relative engagement and how to drive this
We have also undertaken projects focusing on young people’s levels of engagement with different institutions or issues, in which we have sought to understand their current relationship with the institution/issue, what stands in the way of greater engagement and what could trigger and drive it further.
We tend to use mixed methodologies in these sorts of projects, including group and individual work, to triangulate the responses given in different settings.
The main issues for this kind of research are the extent to which young people can engage in discussion when they may have limited awareness or understanding of the subject matter. Overcoming this demands different approaches, often depending on the age of the child, for example
- Ensuring recruitment of at least some young people who report positive engagement
- Using/developing visual or audio stimulus to communicate abstract concepts to children
- Exposing more savvy teenagers to marketing materials – ads, web pages or promotional literature
- Pre-tasking may also be appropriate to help sensitise the least engaged young people to make sure they have something to bring to the discussion.
Projective exercises often work well in these kinds of projects to help young people to articulate their emotions, especially if these are not fully conscious and/or complex. Children and teenagers are open to short tasks which change the pace of a group discussion or allow them to think in a different way. Exercises we commonly use include
- Drawing images or representations (of selves/institutions etc)
- Sentence completion
- Speech and thought bubble completion exercises
- Story telling exercises
- Case studies
- Personification (or the same with animals/cartoon characters etc)
- Collage.