UNICEF Canada designed the Community Child and Youth Well-being Survey process to provide opportunities to involve youth in all stages of the data cycle – planning, promotion, participation, analysis and action. The overall aim is to create a positive experience for young people as active participants rather than passive objects of data collection. 

Involving young people is different from consulting with them. The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) identifies five distinct categories of engagement in their Spectrum of Public Participation. The further along the spectrum you progress, the more positive, meaningful and integrated public participation becomes. 

See the full PDF handout on IAP2’s website.

It is useful to consider how this spectrum applies to all stakeholders at various stages of the project and to develop and communicate their engagement opportunities and commitments with transparency. Each stage can be supported using different tools:

• Inform: fact sheets, websites, open houses
• Consult: focus groups, surveys, public meetings
• Involve: workshops, opportunities to co-design
• Collaborate: citizen advisory committees, participatory decision-making and action-planning
• Empower: citizen juries, ballots, delegated decisions and budgets
  
  

The Ladder of Youth Participation applies a similar approach to youth participation:

There are compelling reasons to provide ample opportunities for youth to participate at the highest levels throughout the data cycle:

1. Build support for the project’s goals and objectives
2. Select the most relevant optional survey questions and demographic identifiers
3. Design and help implement survey engagement and communications strategies that resonate with potential participants
4. Brainstorm ways to reach the most representative sample of youth possible, including traditionally missed groups
5. Troubleshoot issues
6. Make sense of the findings
7. Identify priorities for action
8. Strategize, prototype and deliver relevant action plans
9. Point out where more information is needed
10. Evaluate progress and help ensure accountability
11. Celebrate successes

Youth participation can be accomplished in a number of ways – ideally ideated with and guided by young people themselves. Youth participation will be most principled and effective and create the most positive experiences for youth when it is not seen as an add-on to the main project path (like a box that needs to be checked) but rather as an integrated component of the work all the way along. This will help to ensure the whole survey process not only measures young people’s well-being but helps contribute to it, by creating positive experiences and engagement with the data cycle.