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| Young Decision Making In the summer of 2006 The Students Commission and the Centre of Excellence for Youth Engagement, with our partners throughout Canada were able to hire 18 youth summer staff, with diverse backgrounds and experiences. They identified this as a project that interested them. The initial goal was to collect data from youth about the concept of a national youth body and to answer the question, “is this something youth think is important and something that they want?” Since then, something more meaningful has occurred; young people have identified a desire to take a much more active role in helping explore the idea, promoting the concept to their friends, classmates, teachers and other youth. They are engaging more and more people in the discussion about the development of not just a body or group – but instead an infrastructure that will help ensure young people are able to participate in the studying of, talking about, and decision making on issues facing children and youth in Canada. see the full article... | |
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| Breadth and Intensity of Engagement Some young people like to explore many different activities and interests, leaving a wake of musical instruments, sports equipment, and notebooks full of sketches behind. Others focus on a single activity, and dedicate a lot of their time to it. How are all of these youth benefiting from their engagement? Check out this new and innovative way to understand engagement. Breadth (number of activities) and intensity (frequency of activities) are separable dimensions of involvement according to recent research by the Centre. For example, sometimes the number (breadth) of different activities that young people are involved in are more important for some positive outcomes than how often (intensity) they do the activity. One reason may be that youth get something out of one activity (for example, belonging on their curling team) that they don't get from the other (for example, building self-efficacy from guitar lessons), so having both offers a larger range of possible activity-related growth opportunities. see the full article... | |
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| Youth Engagement and Health Outcomes: Is there a link? Is youth engagement related to positive health outcomes? The Centre of Excellence for Youth Engagement's literature review identifies important evidence of how quality youth engagement is related to decreased alcohol use, marijuana and hard drug use, school failure and drop out, unplanned pregnancy, anti-social and criminal behaviors, and rates of depression. However, it's not so cut and dry: how youth are engaged matters. We have much more to learn about how young people are being effectively supported and by whom, and about the qualities of engagement that create positive outcomes. How has being meaningfully involved affected your life? Please share your comments. see the full article... | |
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| Program Scan What are the ingredients that make a program engaging for youth? Check out the results of a program scan that includes 78 Canadian youth-serving organizations across Canada to find out how youth engaegment happens in their communities. What are some of the ways that youth are engaged in your community? Tell us about your favorite programs and what makes them engaging? see the full article... | |
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| Young Decision-Makers Participatory Action Research Many countries and regions around the world have national youth councils that provide opportunities for young people to express their opinions and views on various matters that affect their everyday lives. Canada does not. There is no forum for young Canadians to create and influence policy and decision-making. Various groups and organizations across the country have been looking at the issue concerning youth voice, and the concept of a national youth infrastructure for Canada has seen increased interest. During July and August 2006, 18 youth summer staff of The Students Commission, lead organization of the Centre of Excellence for Youth Engagement and our partners across Canada have been working on a participatory action research project (PAR) to explore this idea with their peers. The goal is to find out whether youth think that they have a voice, if youth want a formal voice and what the best way to make youth heard nationally might be. Three young people took leadership for the national PAR project, with the support of staff and academic researchers. The survey can be found at http://ydm.engagementsurvey.ca/ or by calling our office at 416.597.8297. Following the data collection, a report outlining the findings and recommendations for next steps will be prepared by youth to be presented to leaders in government, NGOs and potential partners. see the full article... | |
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| Brain Study What happens when a young person and a brain scientist sit down to chat about risk-taking and adolescent brain development? That's what we wanted to find out. This study looks at the relationship between brain chemicals (particularly dopamine) and risk-taking in youth. It contributes to our understanding of pressures that influence youth and of how brain development is related to behaviour. If risk-taking is a part of our brain development, is it important for youth to take risks? Can some risk-taking be positive? see the full article... | |
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| Breadth and Intensity of Engagement Some young people like to explore many different activities and interests, leaving a wake of musical instruments, sports equipment, and notebooks full of sketches behind. Others focus on a single activity, and dedicate a lot of their time to it. How are all of these youth benefiting from their engagement? Check out this new and innovative way to understand engagement. Breadth (number of activities) and intensity (frequency of activities) are separable dimensions of involvement according to recent research by the Centre. For example, sometimes the number (breadth) of different activities that young people are involved in are more important for some positive outcomes than how often (intensity) they do the activity. One reason may be that youth get something out of one activity (for example, belonging on their curling team) that they don't get from the other (for example, building self-efficacy from guitar lessons), so having both offers a larger range of possible activity-related growth opportunities. | |
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| Youth Engagement and Health Outcomes: Is there a link? Is youth engagement related to positive health outcomes? The Centre of Excellence for Youth Engagement's literature review identifies important evidence of how quality youth engagement is related to decreased alcohol use, marijuana and hard drug use, school failure and drop out, unplanned pregnancy, anti-social and criminal behaviors, and rates of depression. However, it's not so cut and dry: how youth are engaged matters. We have much more to learn about how young people are being effectively supported and by whom, and about the qualities of engagement that create positive outcomes. How has being meaningfully involved affected your life? Please share your comments. | |
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| Engagement in Minority Francophone Settings The work that the Fédération de la jeunesse canadienne-française (FJCF) is taking on, in collaboration with the Students Commission and the Centre of Excellence for Youth Engagement, is part of an effort to not only better understand the issue of engagement in a francophone minority setting, but also to develop programs which will promote, in the community infrastructure, a capacity to foster engagement and improve the health and quality of life of francophone communities. We seek to better understand the state of affairs and of knowledge on youth's health and the psychosocial elements that can serve as barriers or as catalysts for youth to get engaged in their francophone community within a minority setting. see the full article... | |
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| Program Scan We also began a scan of youth programs, in an attempt to identify the key features of programs and organizations that were successful at engaging youth. To date, over 75 programs have been entered into our database. We learned so much from our first Program Scan of youth and youth-serving organizations across Canada, that we would like to continue to collect data and expand the number and type of organizations and programs that we scan. If you work for an organization in Canada that engages youth, as staff, as volunteers, or as program participants and you would like to be part of our ongoing survey, please click here... see the full article... | |
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| Summary CEYE Narrative Study
This study is designed to assess the impact of youth conferences on youth engagement and adjustment. The plan was to administer a questionnaire that assessed levels of engagement, along with several measures of adjustment, to youth who had applied to attend a summer conference that focussed on youth involvement in social justice issues. The youth who were accepted for the conference would form our "intervention" group, while those who were not accepted were to form the "comparison" group. We plan to follow both groups for the next three years, sending questionnaires to each at yearly intervals. Early Findings Values and Engagement | |
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| Literature Review One of the initial activities of the Centre of Excellence for Youth Engagement was to conduct a thorough review of the research literature. We (the Centre's partners) have developed a detailed on-line data-base that we have used to enter over 100 articles from scholarly journals and other sources, on the topic of youth engagement. Does Research tell the whole story? see the full article... | |
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| WHAT WE DO... Well, when you bring a diverse team of youth, program developers from youth organizations, academics and researchers, redefining RESEARCH becomes almost as interesting and challenging as doing the research itself. How we involve youth in our research? How do we understand all that terminology? Will traditional research actual capture the pace and essence of youth organizing? Focus groups, qualitative data, ethics committees - ahh! What are these things and how can we make it work for our vision of research and youth engagement? | |
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| What is Youth Engagement ? "Youth Engagement is the meaningful participation and sustained involvement of a young person in an activity, which has a focus outside of him or herself. Full engagement consists of a behavioural component (e.g., spending time doing the activity), an affective component (e.g., deriving pleasure from participating in it) and a cognitive component (e.g., knowledge about the activity)." to define or not to define... see the full article... | |
| Funding for the Centres of Excellence for Children's Well-Being is provided by the Public Health Agency of Canada. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors/researchers and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the Public Health Agency of Canada. | © 2009 The Centre of Excellence for Youth Engagement |