Seeking the views of young people is at the heart of this work and we have developed a Consultation Toolkit with methods to help us do this. The toolkit helps us meet the needs of our consultation partners whilst engaging and listening to young people in the most relevant and accessible way. Consultation Toolkit - National Surveys We can offer quantitative national surveys to seek the views of young people in Scotland. Our surveys can be delivered online using cutting-edge digital engagement methods, or offline using the Young Scot InfoMobiles which travel around the country engaging with young people in their own environment. We promote our surveys through a large number of key cross-sector agencies, to ensure all young people are targeted. Consultation Toolkit - Focus GroupsYoung Scot offers qualitative methods such as focus groups and workshops to help us gather a deeper insight. This encourages young people to share ideas and experiences and can often provide extremely rich results. We do our best to make these sessions fun and inclusive, whilst ensuring that the relevant information is gathered. We recruit young people through our local authority partners via the Dialogue Youth Partnership Network, voluntary organisations and other related organisations as agreed with the commissioning organisation. This access to young people in every local authority in Scotland is one of our biggest assets. Consultation Toolkit - In-Depth Interviews Interviews are another way of providing rich data and this can be particularly useful when engaging with young people on sensitive issues. Interviews can be individual or paired and we work with the commissioning organisation to draft a semi-structured interview script which is flexible to react to interesting statements from interviewees. Video Diaries/ BlogsHigh impact video diaries and blogs are a good way of capturing interesting personal stories and experiences. We provide the equipment for the young people to record their thoughts on a particular subject over a period of time and then we work with the young person to edit the video content into a format that can then be presented to decision-makers. This is an unmediated form of communication and the results can be very powerful. Young Scot: Youth Investigation Teams (LITS)Youth Investigation Teams encourage informed participation by helping young people to organise themselves into teams to investigate and report on issues that are important to them and their peers. The groups are tasked to discuss their findings, produce their own set of conclusions and recommendations and present these through a medium of their choices with the support of Young Scot and commissioning organisation of course. The young volunteers taking part may also be accredited with a nationally recognised Youth Achievement Award. Reporting our FindingsWe can provide written reports based on the findings from the consultation, in typical Young Scot style, we are always looking for creative ways to present information including video, visual or audio arts. We like to deliver the results of our national survey and Youth Investigation Teams through high profile National Discussion Days at which the young people, and a range of invited guests can discuss the findings and agree a shared list of recommendations and action points. This ensures that young people feel they really are involved in something important and it provides them with a platform to fully engage decision-makers and encouraging them to take action.
For more information, please contact info@youngscot.org |