Findings show benefits of youth provision on physical health and wellbeing, pro-social behaviours and education
What effect does regular attendance at youth activities (such as youth clubs) have on young people, at the time and later in their lives? The Youth Evidence Base, commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), has been published today and helps to answer this question.
Public affairs specialists, SQW, led this research with three partners: UK Youth, the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex and the University of Warwick, supported by the Youth Panel, convened by UK Youth, who helped design the research approaches and interpret findings.
ISER Senior Research Fellow and MiSoC Research Associate, Dr Cara Booker, said: ‘We were delighted to be academic partners on this important project and to bring ISER’s expertise to the investigation. We used data from Understanding Society to explore some of the immediate and short-term impacts of youth activities. The findings show clear cohort differences in the characteristics of participants and highlights the short-term benefits of youth activities.’
The report – ‘Youth provision and life outcomes: A study of longitudinal research’ – analyses five different longitudinal datasets. These datasets follow different cohorts of young people, born between the 1970s to 2000s.
Our research examined which young people attend youth provision, and what the impact of attendance is for these young people, both at the time and later in life. Our exact definition of ‘youth provision’ varied slightly, depending on the dataset: in some it was a narrower definition focused on, for example, attendance at uniformed youth clubs (such as Scouts). In others, the definition was broader, including a wider range of activities outside school. Wherever possible, our focus was open access youth provision for all young people regardless of background.
We defined ‘impact’ in terms of: educational outcomes, employment/career pathways, general health, mental health, life satisfaction and wellbeing, crime and anti-social behaviour.
We found:
- There is a clear association between participation in youth provision and positive short-term outcomes relating to physical health and wellbeing, pro-social behaviours and education
- There is also evidence that some of these short-term outcomes are sustained over decades
- For young people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, youth provision may contribute to a reduction in the likelihood of negative outcomes such as likelihood of interactions with the police
- Each of the longitudinal datasets ‘told its own story’, perhaps most strikingly, in relation to the profile of young people attending youth provision over time. For example, while participants born in 1970 attending youth clubs in the mid-1980s tended to be young men from poorer backgrounds, later, in 2010s, attendees tended to be from better-off families.
The findings from this new research add to a growing body of robust evidence about the impact the youth sector generates for young people.
Read the report here