scholarly journals Focus Groups, Community Engagement, and Researching with Young People

2017 ◽  
pp. 357-379
Author(s):  
Sally Lloyd-Evans
2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 198-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eliza Hixson

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the social impact that two events, the Adelaide Fringe Festival and the Clipsal 500, have on young residents (16-19 years old) of Adelaide. The purpose of this paper is to examine how young people participate in these events and how this affects their sense of involvement in the event and contributes to their identity development. Design/methodology/approach – A mixed methods approach was adopted in which focus groups and questionnaires were conducted with secondary school students. As an exploratory study, focus groups (n=24) were conducted in the first stage of the research. The results of the focus groups were used to develop a questionnaire that resulted in 226 useable responses. The final stage of the research explored one event in further depth in order to determine the influence of different participation levels. Findings – This study found that young people demonstrated more involvement in the Adelaide Fringe Festival and their identities were more influenced by this event. Further investigation of the Adelaide Fringe Festival also indicated that level of participation affects the social outcomes gained, with those participating to a greater degree achieving higher involvement and increased identity awareness. This is demonstrated through a model which aims to illustrate how an event impact an individual based on their role during the event. Originality/value – This paper applies two leisure concepts in order to analyse the impact of events. Activity involvement is a concept which examines the importance of the activity in the participant's life. Also of importance to young people is how activities contribute to their identities, especially because they are in a transitional period of their lives.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn McEwan

As trends of social and economic change allow precarity to inch into the lives of those who may have been more accustomed to security (Standing, 2011, 2014), this paper addresses the response of some young people who are caught “betwixt and between” in potentially liminal states (Turner, 1967). Those whose families have undertaken intra- or intergenerational social mobility and who have made a home in a place, Ingleby Barwick in Teesside, that seems to be of them and for them—an in-between place that is seen as “not quite” middle or working class. This paper draws data from a research project that adopted a qualitative phenomenological approach to uncover the meaning of experiences for participants. Methods included focus groups and semi-structured interviews through which 70 local people contributed their thoughts, hopes, concerns, and stories about their lives now and what they aspire to for the future. Places, such as the large private housing estate in the Northeast of England on which this research was carried out, make up significant sections of the UK population, yet tend to be understudied populations, often missed by a sociological gaze attracted to extremes. It was anticipated that in Ingleby Barwick, where social mobility allows access to this relatively exclusive estate, notions of individualism and deservingness that underlie meritocratic ideology (Mendick et al., 2015; Littler, 2018) would be significant, a supposition borne out in the findings. “Making it” to Ingleby was, and continues to be, indicative to many of meritocratic success, making it “a moral place for moral people” (McEwan, 2019). Consequently, the threat then posed by economic precarity, of restricting access to the transitions and lifestyles that create the “distinction” (Bourdieu, 1984) required to denote fit to this place, is noted to be very real in a place ironically marked by many outside it as fundamentally unreal.


2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (15) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Valentina Calcaterra ◽  
Maria Luisa Raineri

This article presents the research of the project Giving Young People a Voice: Advocacy in Children’s Homes, set up as a result of the interest of a nonprofit organization working with looked-after children, with an aim to improve advocacy as a listening process and to promote the participation of children that reside in children’s homes. The research focused on the implementation of a visiting advocacy project and the activities carried out by an independent advocate working in children’s homes. The children’s evaluation of the project was collected by two focus groups; interviews were conducted with social care workers and the manager of the organization. This research deals with the implementation of the first visiting advocacy project in the context of the Italian child protection system.


This chapter introduces the authors' approach to university-community engagement as the process of collaborative learning among the young people engaged in afterschool activities run by University-Community Links (UC Links), along with the community and university people who have collectively engaged in designing, planning, and implementing those program activities. The prevalence of social displacement among community participants suggests a primary point for understanding the role that universities can play by engaging in the larger world. The chapter introduces the authors' ethnographic approach to the study of expansive learning among collaborating community and university partners as they confront dilemmas implicit in their engagement in joint activity and come to view their shared activity from an expanded perspective that transforms how they work together. The chapter then describes the historical emergence of UC Links, a California initiative that connects university and community partners in addressing pervasive social displacement and educational inequities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-57
Author(s):  
Jon Dean

Recent reports have cautioned that charities are behind the curve in taking advantage of the potential benefits of digital technologies and social media, a problem that particularly affects their engagement with young people. This article assesses the data from a series of focus groups, including a participatory digital element, with students and recent graduates (aged 18‐25), examining participants’ current engagement with charity online. The focus groups show that while the right celebrity or organisational backing helps charity messages cut through, overall it is those causes and requests for donations that come through family and friends that are still the main drivers of young people’s engagement with charity on social media. Supporting findings from similar studies, this shows that, despite the global connectivity digital offers, we should think carefully about what can be expected from the charity‐digital relationship, and the continued importance of existing offline relationships for students and new graduates.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-48
Author(s):  
Monika Sobeková Majková ◽  
Aleksandr Ključnikov

Abstract Worldwide scientific researches present the entrepreneurs have to declare specific characteristic traits to be successful in the business. This paper is focused on the comparison of the specific character traits between potential young entrepreneurs and other young people. The aim is to compare the three chosen character traits differences between these two focus groups by using the statistical method of Pearson's chi-square and bring the answers on the questions why some people incline to becoming the entrepreneurs more intensively than others, and what are the differences between them in relation to the character traits and their personality characteristics. The research was conducted among 1233 young people in all regions of Slovakia in 2012. The results show, that young people who plan to become an entrepreneur, are more creative, willing to face the risk, more confident in the solvation of complicated problems and difficult tasks with the opposite group of respondents.


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