Potentials, and Challenges When Surveying Youth and Emerging Adults |
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| Coordinator 1 | Dr Diana Schacht (German Youth Institute (DJI)) |
| Coordinator 2 | Dr Anne Berngruber (German Youth Institute (DJI)) |
| Coordinator 3 | Professor Dirk Schubotz (Queen's University Belfast) |
Surveys are a good way to ask young people themselves about their own life but face particular challenges owing to the specifics of the target population. Youth, and especially emerging adulthood, are fast-changing, hard-to-define, and unstable phases of life. A life stage where they explore and shape their identity and increasingly detach from parents. As most adolescents live with their family during their school years or beyond, parents might act as gatekeepers for the reachability of young target persons; influences on response behavior through the presence of parents might also be challenging. The reachability of emerging adults in surveys might be more difficult as this ‘rush-hour of life’ is characterized by lots of changes, such as transitioning from school to VET or university, several first life events like romantic relationships which are often not permanent, or moving out of the parent’s household and living in alternative and fast-changing forms of housing. This session aims to consolidate empirical evidence and methodological advancements in surveying youth and emerging adulthood. Submissions are invited that focus for example on methodological innovations or provide substantive applications demonstrating the utility and assessing the quality of youth data. We welcome all types of studies on youth surveys, e.g., meta-analysis, regional, cross-sectional, longitudinal, mixed-method, and cross-comparative studies.
Potential topics for submissions include, but are not limited to:
o Defining and targeting the youth population
o Sharing best practices, notable failures, and innovative approaches to sampling and surveying youth and emerging adults going beyond their roles as pupils, trainees, students
o Experiences in surveying young people via Apps, Smartphones, and survey modes
o Reaching diversity-sensitive groups within this population (LGBTQ+, disabled persons)
o Addressing item non-response and selection bias
o Developing analysis strategies for youth survey