Case study five

An evaluation of a teenage pregnancy prevention strategy

Aims of the project

This project, funded by Leicester City Council, aimed to evaluate the local teenage pregnancy prevention strategy.

How you found people to involve

We made flyers and advertisements and sent them out through the agencies which were part of the teenage pregnancy prevention strategy board and through the youth clubs. Connexions was part of the board and they offered to employ the young people for us. They were part of the recruitment process and the young people’s contracts were with them.

We got a big response. So we invited them all in for an ‘information and selection’ day where they could find out about the project. Young people often don’t know what research is. So we talked through different news articles for them to think about evidence and how much credibility you give to different information. So they got a better idea about what we were going to do. We also got them to do tasks that helped us to make an assessment of their skills and abilities to do the job. We thought all the young people who were prepared to make the commitment were up to doing the job – so we offered a post to all that wanted it in the end. We took on more people than we had expected – because a lot of them turned out to be young parents (although that wasn’t our intention) – so we knew there would be availability issues. We had a team of eight young people – seven young women and one young man and all but two were parents.

How you involved people

Young people were involved in the project as peer researchers. They designed the information collection methods, carried out interviews with other young people in local youth clubs and schools and helped with the analysis and presentation of the findings. They also contributed to the development of the interview schedules for other interviews with parents and teachers.

I involved young people in my research because it’s just the way I have always done things. I have a background in youth work and I’ve involved young people in all the research I’ve done. You get a double benefit. You benefit from the knowledge, experience and advice of the young people you work with – but the fact that you involve young people also gives you credibility with the group of people you want to take part in your research. It puts you in a better place to know how to work with young people as well as a deeper understanding of the work you do. Since we did this project, we have been able to work with the University to employ young people on bank contracts – as Associate Research Assistants (ARAs) – so we’re able to work with them on a sessional basis for a year. Over the past 12 months the ARAs have been actively involved in one big project and have been involved in an advisory capacity on other projects. They are also thinking about how they might take forward their own piece of research. In the past our formal contact with young researchers finished when their specific project came to an end. So employing ARAs is a good way of keeping people on board after a project has finished and making the most of their new skills and experience. Young people tend to move on very quickly in their lives – so being able to keep them involved in this way helps us to get the most out of our investment of time and resources. It also means we can involve them at much earlier stages of a project (for example writing bids). It’s a more satisfying experience for them too.

What training and support did you offer?

We provided a lot of training and made sure that it met their needs. We did it over a number of short days. The young people were paid to attend the training, as it was an essential part of their work. We held it at Connexions and organised a lunch but importantly we also had to organise a crèche. Some of the young parents had never left their children in a nursery before. So we had a day before they started, where they could take the children to the nursery for a while and stay with them, as a way for them to feel comfortable leaving their children. We covered a lot of material around methods – what is research and evaluation, different information collection methods and they considered each method’s advantages and disadvantages – and in so doing built up decisions for what we were going to do in the project. So the young people decided how we would collect the information. And we did a lot around ethics and informed consent and confidentiality. They were very anxious about two things – child protection issues, in particular what would happen if someone told them something they were concerned about. And secondly what they would do if the young people they were interviewing weren’t interested or behaved badly or were rude. So we did a lot of role-playing and rehearsed exactly what to say in the interviews, so they could also develop all the wording about introducing the project and explaining the ethical and confidentiality issues in a way they were comfortable with.

The young people never went out to do interviews on their own. They were always accompanied by somebody from the University. We would arrange to meet up in town and then go to the site together in a taxi but at the schools and youth clubs they did all the interviews and facilitated the group sessions themselves. Some of the young people also came with personal issues that we were not able to respond to and maybe it was not our responsibility, but we did know where they could go to get the appropriate help. So we didn’t counsel people. We suggested people and places that could help them, and then we checked they had been and were getting support.

What difference did public involvement make?

The young people made a big difference to the part of the project that involved interviewing other young people. They decided what methods to use, helped us decide what questions to ask and which local schools and youth clubs to work with. They were really reflective about collecting this information – along the lines of – ‘If I was in school and people were coming to ask me about this – who would I rather talk to?’, ‘What would I think if someone asked me that?’. They did all the information collection with young people – both through one-to-one interviews and facilitating group sessions.They also influenced other parts of the project through raising questions and making us look at things in ways we wouldn’t have thought of. For example one of the things they talked about beforehand (that was confirmed by our research) was that the people they really wanted to talk to about sex and relationships were their parents. But their parents couldn’t do this. They pointed out that it was the parents who needed most help. So that prompted us to ask parents more about this in our interviews than we might otherwise have done.

I don’t think there’s any way, that without their involvement, we could have got the sort of data that they got – even if we had had an advisory group and used their questions and advice. Without a doubt they had it. There were times when we thought they were brusque in the questioning but the other young people didn’t mind. As adults we use politeness to show we are respectful of young people – but the young people didn’t feel the need to do that amongst themselves.And there’s also no doubt that young people were really impressed to see other young people in this kind of a role. At some of the youth clubs, the workers said how good it was to see how young people can be involved in research.

The young people helped us to analyse the findings and draw out the recommendations. This had an enormous impact. Because we gave the commissioners action points which had quite clearly come from the young people’s analysis of the findings – nearly all of them have been implemented. One of my colleagues bumped into one of the staff on the strategy board, and they said it was the best piece of research they’d had, that they’d followed through on all the actions and that the teenage pregnancy rate is now dropping. We can’t prove any connection between all these things – but there could be a link. It also helped that one of the young people co-presented the findings and that they had all written the presentation. The fact that young people were involved gave the research added credibility as well. Not everyone would have been more impressed with a piece of research that young people had been involved in – but that particular audience was. That made a big difference to the impact of the results.

What would you advise other researchers about involvement?

I do think it improves research. There are different types of knowledge and understanding. It’s about recognising that young people or service users not only have something to contribute in terms of answering your questions – but can actually help to frame those questions and the whole process. You have to work with people on their terms. With young people, they don’t turn up sometimes, they don’t always communicate – but that’s young people – that’s just what happens. If you engage with young people, you just have to accept that that’s the case. It makes the research more interesting for other people. We ask quite a lot of people in terms of giving their time to our projects and our interests. The least that we can do is to make it as interesting and pleasant as it can be and I think involvement helps to do that. You do have to believe in it and believe in the underpinning values of it to be able to do it – there’s nothing worse than tokenistic involvement. It takes an awful lot of time, but I am 100% convinced that it’s worth it.

Contact details

Jennie Fleming
Researcher
Centre for Social Action
De Montfort University
Hawthorn Building
The Gateway
Leicester LE1 9BH

Tel: 0116 257 7873
Email: jfleming@dmu.ac.uk

Acknowledgement

This case study first appeared in Blackburn H., Hanley B. and Staley K. (2010) Turning the pyramid upside down: examples of public involvement in social care research, INVOLVE, Eastleigh.