Youth research
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Dariusz: [00:00:00] Welcome to the next episode of our Enter 30 podcast, of the EU Council of Europe Youth Partnership. Today we are somehow coming back to the basics. We are going to talk about youth research. The has been a lot of things done, written in the partnership about youth research.

Dariusz: Maybe Lana, at the beginning, can you just kind of introduce us into the topic a little bit? What has been done recently, in the youth partnership when it comes to youth research?

Lana: Thank you Darek. It is important to also to mention that this podcast is being recorded as a part of our massive open online course on youth research, also known as the MOOC. And, we ran the MOOC for the first time in 2023 and, we will be of course, opening it now as our other two MOOCs on youth policy and youth work in a self paced format. So, this [00:01:00] podcast is really going to be used as a basis for our learners of the MOOC to understand what is youth research, how is it used for youth policy. And, also what are the main topics that we research on.

Lana: So, within that context, we have a pleasure to have it as today, Dr. Howard Williamson, who has, done a lot of huge research and also supported a lot of huge policy processes within not only Council of Europe but also internationally. so I would like to invite Howard actually to tell us what is the youth research and why should everybody within the youth sector be familiar with it?

Howard: Well, I think, thank you, Lana. And hello, Darek. I think the first thing to say you, you tend to align youth research with youth work and youth policy. And of course, youth research is much, much, much broader than either of those things. And we need to then think about youth work research. And we also need to think about the relationship between [00:02:00] youth research and youth policy, because some youth research doesn't really help policy very much at all.

Howard: And some could, if policymakers listened and were aware of it. And then you need to step back and then say, well, we've got this kind of wonderful idea of youth research and what is, what is youth and what is research? So you, you really have to step back to some really tough definitional problems and I don't want to dwell here on what is youth.

Howard: But we know that we've got age boundaries that are very different in different countries and in Europe and across the world. And then there is this concept of research and sort of pure academic research, blue skies, thinking heavily theorized, lots of concepts, lots of big ideas, which often mystify the rest of the world.

Howard: Nobody else knows what they're talking about. And then you've got a much more applied research, which could have some relevance to policymaking and that sort [00:03:00] of drifts into evaluation research, which may be evaluating policy. So rather than informing policy, it's sort of following policy and seeing whether it's worked or not.

Howard: So, and, and then you have the, the classic kind of challenges for research, which is quantitative or qualitative research. Some people may know of the Carnegie Foundation, and some years ago they had a 10 year project on young people called Years of Decision. And I wrote the sort of orientation book for that particular program.

Howard: And I wrote something called In Search of a Framework. And it was really saying, how do we want to research young people? Do we want to research young people over time, the same young people over time kind of cohort studies? Do we want to compare young people now with a previous generation? Do we want to [00:04:00] compare and contrast different groups of young people?

Howard: And do we want to compare and contrast different groups of young people and, the inequalities between those different groups of young people? Have they got worse? Have they got better? There's a whole range of possible strategies for researching young people. And once you've even decided on the methodologies that you might want to adopt, then there is the question of who does it?

Howard: And then the final point I would probably want to make with these introductory remarks is when you've got hold of this research, how do you communicate it to the wider world? What kind of language are you using? You know, is it still in book form?

Howard: I mean, I've written 58 books. I think my students don't read books anymore very much. So there's a question, there's always been a question about how you, speak your research to a wider audiences, particularly policy makers who, who are not [00:05:00] always receptive to your research if it challenges their political perspectives.So there's, there's some sort of opening thoughts, really.

Lana: Thank you, Howard. I have a follow up question because you introduced us to how to do youth research or how it is done. And you also mentioned, who could be doing it.

Lana: But maybe You can also tell us why is it important to do youth research?

Howard: Well, the simple answer to that is that we need to build practice and policy on evidence. So we talk a lot about evidence based youth policy. I'm not a great believer in it myself, and I've probably been more involved in policy making than many people who are also researchers.Everybody likes to think that research evidence informs policy and practice.

Howard: Everybody likes to think that policy makers listen to research [00:06:00] evidence and that practitioners guide their practice on research evidence. I'm not convinced of this at all, but we have to keep trying and we have to keep telling people when good ideas from research should be continued with we should, should consolidate them and develop them.

Howard: And when bad ideas should be abandoned, unfortunately, it's not just research and evidence that informs policy and practice. It's all kinds of other things. It's practitioner preferences and policy priorities, political priorities, and so on. So, to answer your question why, it's a bit of a labor of love, really, doing youth research, because an awful lot of it does get consigned to the bin long before it ever has any kind of influence on the wider world.

Dariusz: You talked a little bit about youth researchers. A lot of people call themselves youth researchers whenever they do [00:07:00] research on young people. What makes a youth researcher? Who is a youth reseracher? Can young people be youth researchers?

Howard: Well, of course, young people can be youth researchers and one of the methodological developments in youth research has been to engage with young people in ways that are, you know, in inverted commas, youth friendly. So you have to develop new forms of, of method to get young people involved. But there are a whole set of questions then about when should young people be involved?

Howard: Should they be involved in research design? Are they involved in providing the data? Are they involved in scrutinizing and commenting on the outcomes of research, the conclusions of research? Are they involved in the dissemination of that research? So, your question was much broader than should young people be involved, you know, who, who else is involved?

Howard: And, it is, it is a [00:08:00] rather slippery concept, youth research, because many people might describe themselves as youth researchers because they research young people, but they are sociologists, they're psychologists, they're political scientists, and they actually come from different academic disciplines, which informs the kind of methods that they choose to use in doing the studies.

Howard: It just happens to be that their primary focus of attention happens to be young people. And that's good because we build, build a body of knowledge about young people, which the White Paper on Youth from the European Commission in 2001, you know, it was one of the four priorities, alongside participation, information, voluntary activities, and the fourth was a greater understanding of youth.

Howard: One of the problems is that when you have such a diversity of people doing youth research using very different methodologies, which have different levels of credibility, you [00:09:00] end up with a, you can almost find any research that suits your particular perspective and your particular position.And I think that we..., I'm a qualitative researcher, I'm an ethnographer fundamentally, so I've always got a slight suspicion about big picture surveys, which tell you an awful lot about what, but they tell you very little about why or how.So I tend to be somebody who wants research that illuminates a particular group of young people and their lives or illustrates a particular issue that is facing young people at the moment.

Howard: And I'm not so worried about it having strong scientific credibility. I think it should be a platform for discussion.But then I get criticized because, you know, it's kind of pseudoscience or it's soft science. It's not the kind of classical scientific method. So, before you've [00:10:00] even got anywhere near the policymaking arena or before you've got anywhere near helping practitioners think about what's the best way of working with young people or supporting young people or addressing youth homelessness or young people who leave public care systems.

Howard: Before you've got anywhere near those kinds of things, you've got a whole set of arguments about what is credible and who has done it.

Lana: We discussed a little bit who the researchers are, and, I'd like to say within the youth partnership of course we cooperate, with several networks and we actually coordinate a pool of European youth researchers and its advisory group that Howard is, of course, a member of. And then on the other hand, we also have the European Knowledge Center for Youth Policy, or ECIP, which are the people in the Council of Europe Member States which help us to gather data at the national level.

Lana: But are there any other [00:11:00] networks or groups, Howard, that you would like to mention that should be important when considering youth research, or who can people approach, besides for our Pool of European Youth Researchers, if they would like to find out more about lives of young people in Europe?

Howard: Well, that's a very interesting question. And just to comment on the Pool of European Youth Researchers and the European Knowledge Centre on Youth Policy, I mean, they both contain some very interesting individuals with different experience, different histories. So some are younger, some are starting on their careers.

Howard: Some are more established like me. It's a good mix of people who are doing research. We don't always agree. And that's, that's not no bad thing. But there are other networks and one of the, sadnesses I suppose in my research life is that, you know, there are employment research [00:12:00] institutes who do a lot of research on youth unemployment.

Howard: There are other kinds of focused research institutes, the Oxford Internet Centre, for example.

Howard: Despite all those differences that already exist, we tend to operate in a bit of a bubble, and we're rather oblivious to a lot of other research on young people that is going on in other ways in other institutions. And, I know the MOOC also has a short piece on the history of youth research and it talks about the German Youth Institute, which has always been very significant.

Howard: And it talks about the yard study and it talks about the Nordic Youth Research Symposia, which started in the late 1980s in Copenhagen, I think, and has functioned generally every couple of years and does a lot of very interesting stuff. What is not in the MOOC is too much reference to the Research Committee 34 of the International Sociological [00:13:00] Association, which is youth research around the world, but it did start in Europe and it did start with the Romanian in 1975.

Howard: then we have the European Sociological Association, RN30, it's called Research Network 30, which started in 1995. They all have a massive body of youth research, but it is much less connected to the policymaking arena and to the field of practice with young people and I am deliberately avoiding the word youth work and I said the field of practice in work with young people because it's sometimes much more than about youth work practice.

Lana: So given the context now where we see a lot of young people and maybe researchers relying on Google or chat GPT. How do you see the development of youth research within the [00:14:00] context of these changing technologies?

Howard: Well, first of all, I have to own up to my relative naivety about some of the technologies I, I learn, learn a lot from Johnny Penn, I have to say, and other people who know a lot more about AI.My view is that things like AI, chat GPT, all of these things are extra. Instruments available to us to do different kinds of research.

Howard: I'm a kind of hanging around researcher, you know, so I've spent most of my life, I've done, I think, 75 research projects and a lot of them have been sitting in doorways with homeless people or hanging around on the streets with young Offenders and generally doing participant observation. That, that's my favored methodology, and of course we move on.

Howard: So when I was doing my research on the Milltown Boys, which is a 52 year study so [00:15:00] far, the longest ever ethnography in the world, that's ever happened, longitudinal ethnography as it's called, when I started with them in 1973, you were either a kind of quant person sitting in an office sending out surveys and then analyzing the data or you were a qualitative person hanging around like i did with in youth research it was about hanging around on the streets and and then you had these people in the middle the center for contemporary cultural studies was mentioned in the MOOC on the history part of the development of youth research.

Howard: Somebody once said that those researchers should have done a little more field work and a little less guesswork, because they wrote a great deal about young people, but very few of them ever, ever mingled or mixed with young people at all. So you have these, these different approaches and I've been very fortunate in my research life to have witnessed a massive expansion of [00:16:00] methodologies, photo elicitation, diary keeping, all kinds of ways of gathering data. And I think that new technologies, social media. which I used quite a lot for my third book on the Milltown boys, for example, because they posted a lot of discussion about my research on Facebook, that particular generation of young people who are no longer young people.

Howard: They're pensioners now. So I've studied them all of their lives. So I think we have to, in English, we would say the jury is still out on AI and where it fits with the youth research agenda more broadly.

Dariusz: I was wondering Howard as well about the trends in youth research, if they exist, of course, meaning developments, challenges in terms of methodology, in terms of themes. I mean, it was very clear that after COVID-19 there was a lot of [00:17:00] research related to young people and COVID 19. Uh, now we are in the era of AI.

Dariusz: There's more and more research coming on artificial intelligence and young people and youth work, and so on. So, how do you see youth research develops in terms of trends and what kind of challenges do you see?

Howard: Well, first of all, I was very critical of the proliferation of research during COVID. I mean, it was necessary, but just everybody jumped on the bandwagon, and most young people didn't want more bloody research. They wanted more practice. I actually volunteered to be a practitioner again. So I, I became a COVID 19 Community Resilience Youth Support Worker.

Howard: What a wonderful title that is. And I had that for two years with my municipality to support young people. And when I talked to young people, they, they told me they were so fed up of all these people asking them what it was like living under COVID. You know, [00:18:00] they wanted. more help with how to live under COVID. So sometimes we have too much research, you know, we could get bombarded with it. In terms of trends, that's, you know, I'm, I'm always very cautious about trying to predict the future. And, we actually have a new publication right now called Futures for Youth Work, published by the European Academy on Youth Work, which I have a kind of love hate relationship with. I've read it, and it's got a lot of very interesting points, but how, how easily can we predict the future?

Howard: I think what we've got is a good range of methodologies which can increase and improve, but the question is always about the credibility. I mean, I've worked with politicians long enough to know that when you tell them a few good stories, they say, yeah, but where's the surveys?

Howard: Where's the quantitative picture. And when you give them the quantitative picture, they say, yeah, but where's the good stories.So you're never [00:19:00] going to win. And one of the things that I think is interesting at the moment in terms of using youth research to develop the credibility of practice with young people, including youth work, is that on the one hand, we have a quite attractive internally celebrated methodology called most significant change, whichis about young people saying what's made a difference in their lives and then researchers sort of interrogate how that moment had arisen through what kind of practices have taken place and so on and that's wonderful within the youth work sector or the youth sector but actually people out there just think it's another set of good stories, and they're not that interested in it. And then at the other end of the spectrum, you've got the social return on investment, which is the political pressure to have research that tells them why it's worth investing in young people in the ways that we do, [00:20:00] what kinds of outcomes and impact has been achieved and we get some, you know, we get people like PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst Young and some of the big consultancy firms in the world doing that kind of research, which may be much more credible to politicians, but is deeply questioned by the youth research field who say, what do these people know about doing youth research?

Howard: So there's a lot of tensions about the choices that are made. And those tensions then spill over into, you know, who's going to then tell the story of that research to the political establishment. I've always been heavily criticized in my life for kind of selling my soul to the devil, you know, why do I get involved?

Howard: Why do I waste my time, people sometimes put it, going to London to meet politicians, going to Brussels, going to Strasbourg, going to New York to, to talk to [00:21:00] politicians about research evidence they say no no that's not our job, our job is to do the research and then it's for other people to read what we've written.And i say it is our job and i think we have a moral responsibility to engage with the policy makers but you cannot convey to policy makers the complexities of your methodology, the complexities of your analysis you have to give them quite simple messages which you tend to corrupt the quality of your research findings.

Howard: But if you don't, then politicians are not going to listen. So, you know, I remember talking in Strasbourg, actually, 40 years ago to Paul Willis, who's a legendary youth sociologist from the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. And Paul's work was very significant in terms of municipal youth development work and in times of Margaret Thatcher.

Howard: In the UK, when [00:22:00] many public sector cuts were being made, and I remember asking Paul where his red line was, where was the boundary between him as a researcher and him as a policy influencer? And his red line was definitely a lot closer to the youth research community than mine was, but we all have our red lines.

Howard: And the question is, if you spend too much time in the policy arena, maybe you should give up being a researcher and join the policymaking sector. So, it's very hard to determine what those red lines are and you have to be ready for quite a lot of criticism that you've corrupted the purity of your research findings by engaging with the world of policy and practice.

Lana: Thank you Howard. That has actually connected quite well to the next question I wanted to ask you, which is how do you would you inspire someone who is not a youth researcher, [00:23:00] to read some of the latest findings? Because I know researchers are always looking forward to having more data or reading new information about lives of young people.

Lana: And you already kind of mentioned this a bit by speaking about selecting what you communicate to policy makers. So what would be this kind of methods of communication or dissemination that would inspire policy makers or youth workers or youth organizations to engage more meaningfully with youth research?

Howard: Well, it kind of cuts two ways, doesn't it? I mean, it's also how youth researchers speak to policy makers and practitioners, because if they wrap all their presentation up in the language of theoretical youth research and start talking about postmodern liquid modernity or something like that.[00:24:00]

Howard: Then nobody's ever heard of Zygmunt Bauman beyond the sort of research community and then people will say, you know, dismiss them as arrogant, sort of self indulgent academics. So, there's that side. You've got to find platforms where people come together. I mean, I was one of the founders long ago, 20 years ago, of something called the Research Policy and Practice Forum on Young People.

Howard: And I managed to get the British government, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the National Youth Agency in England to work together. That was quite a miraculous achievement, and the government paid for it, the, research institute sort of organized the speakers, and the National Youth Agency sort of administered it, and what we did was we managed to get the three sides of the triangle together to interrogate or to [00:25:00] investigate or to discuss some of the key issues that we felt prevailed in young people's lives at the time. Social cohesion, mentoring, drug dependency, different kinds of issues and different kinds of challenges for society and for young people. And it worked reasonably well, but it's always going to have quite a lot of tension.

Howard: I mean, we talk a lot about the magic triangle of youth policy research and practice. And I guess I epitomize the triangle and I was the triangle before it even existed, because I never wanted to be a full time academic. I wanted to be a practitioner. I did contract research for many, many years to keep my foot in the door of academia.

Howard: And I was heavily involved in high level policymaking across a lot of different policy areas, substance misuse, education, criminal justice, and, [00:26:00] and so on. And, I don't know why I had credibility, but I did have credibility, maybe because I knew the research extremely well. But I didn't speak about it like a researcher.

Howard: I spoke about it like a kind of practitioner who understood policy. And if you think about that triangle, you need more researchers speaking to policy makers and practitioners. You need more, practitioners speaking to policy makers and researchers, and you need more policy makers speaking to researchers and practitioners, and learning from those other two corners of the triangle.

Howard: And then people will start to realize that these three things need to meld together in more effective ways if in the middle of that triangle, you've got young people who are the focus of our concerns, our priorities and so on. Unfortunately, you often create a kind of [00:27:00] battleground. And I, I mean, very few researchers ever retain seats at the table of policymaking because they don't speak in the right way.

Howard: And researchers like to talk forever. They like to always problematize things. And one of our problems in the youth sector is we are good at talking with each other forever. And we're not very good at joining groups of people who have to make fast, tough decisions quickly.

Lana: So Howard has already mentioned the youth sector triangle and bringing together youth research, youth practitioners and youth policy makers. And, this is kind of also the purpose of the youth partnership and we hope that, we bring together at our events, and through our publications, different sides of the triangle to communicate, collaborate, and make decisions together within, of course, the mandate that we have. In terms of the future of the [00:28:00] research, for our current work plan we are looking at some of the topics that have been highlighted by our networks, and of course, through Eurobarometer and other surveys that seem to be important at the moment to young people, which include, of course, climate action.

Lana: We had our big symposium just two months ago on this topic, not only looking at the climate change and sustainability, but also how young people engage with it. And, what are the expectations of young people in terms of changes that are needed in this realm? We have the research on young people's mental health and well being.

Lana: This is quite a big topic at the moment, since the pandemic, but not only related to the pandemic, also to other issues such as employment, cost of living, and the security situation in the world. We have a big research on [00:29:00] youth mainstreaming and youth perspective, because youth participation in Council of Europe and the European Commission is now taking on a new form of kind of including more young people into giving feedback and participating in decision making on different policies. And, we have a big research. on young people in rural areas where we are doing both quantitative and qualitative survey in, quantitative survey in 20 languages and also qualitative study of the needs and perspectives of, of young people in rural areas across Europe.

Lana: And of course, we have our longstanding research on youth work, which includes numerous components. We'll be presentinga lot on this topic, also in the upcoming youth work convention in Malta in May, 2025.

Dariusz: Thank you, Lana. Any closing remarks? Howard?

Howard: Well, the only one, and Lana [00:30:00] has captured it somewhat in her remarks just now, which is, it's not just about a triangle between research, policy and practice. It's also about, what might be called the kind of triangulation in research methods where you use surveys and you use qualitative inquiry and you use, you may use diaries.

Howard: You may use AI. We have this multiplicity of methods that need to be woven together like a tapestry in order to produce tensions in the findings. I mean, you can get young people's responses to surveys. And then when you talk to young people, it's a, it's a much more nuanced and much more calibrated kind of set of recommendations that you might be want to be producing for policy development.

Howard: And that ties in with the wider context of, I mean, Lana mentioned mental health and well being and everybody knows I hate us discussing mental health in the, in the [00:31:00] youth sector. It's a specialist issue and, we should be talking about well being of young people and try to abandon this word mental health. I think, you know, inter-agency partnerships, which I was writing about 40 years ago about the precarious equilibrium between the youth sector and the employment sector, between the youth sector and the health sector, those kinds of things where we bring together. We have the partnership, which Lana represents.

Howard: I think we also need much better partnerships, small p, partnerships, between different sectors that affect young people's lives. And once again, one of those things that I bore people with is that youth work is a tiny fragment of the wider youth policy world. And youth research needs to influence the wider youth policy world.

Lana: I would just like to say a big thanks, to you, Darek, and also to [00:32:00] Howard, for always, being such a kind of, like memory of the youth sectors' knowledge, and, research and always having insights on the things that are happening now, but also keeping taking us back to how the sector and the youth research have developed over time.

Lana: It's always a pleasure to talk to you. And I have to say, every time we speak, I learn something new.