Academic literature on the topic 'Youth-centred approach'

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented global crisis, affecting millions globally and in Canada. While efforts to limit the spread of the infection and ‘flatten the curve’ may buffer children and youth from acute illness, these public health measures may worsen existing inequities for those living on the margins of society. In this commentary, we highlight current and potential long-term impacts of COVID-19 on children and youth centring on the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), with special attention to the accumulated toxic stress for those in difficult social circumstances. By taking responsive action, providers can promote optimal child and youth health and well-being, now and in the future, through adopting social history screening, flexible care models, a child/youth-centred approach to “essential” services, and continual advocacy for the rights of children and youth.

Youth wellbeing is a pressing international problem, and it is a key concern of educational institutions, considering the substantial amount of time that youth spend in school. Educators require empirically validated and theoretically sound methods to support students’ wellbeing. This article critically examines the literature on youth wellbeing and interventions in positive education and proposes an innovative, social ecological approach to promoting wellbeing in education. Personal Projects Analysis is a complementary approach addressing several gaps identified in existing interventions (e.g. lack of consideration of ecological and cultural contexts, need for a person-centred approach to support unique goals of diverse students). Implications and applications are discussed to demonstrate how school leadership and educators can apply Personal Projects Analysis to promote the wellbeing of all students.

(1) Background: This article adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to analyse, examine, and reflect upon prominent health literacy (HL) understandings in childhood and youth. (2) Method: The conceptual analysis combined Rodgers’ and Jabareen’s approaches to conceptual analysis in eight phases. (3) Results: First, we present exploratory entry points for developing a child-specific HL understanding based on the six dimensions of a ‘health-literacy 6D model’. Second, we describe and reflect upon five meta-level dimensions covering the HL definitions and models for children and youth found in the conceptual analysis. Third, we integrate our findings into a target-group-centred HL definition for children and youth. (4) Discussion/Conclusion: This article raises awareness for the heterogeneity of the current conceptual HL debate. It offers a multidisciplinary approach for advancing the existing understanding of HL. Four recommendations for future actions are deduced from the following four principles, which are inherent to the proposed target-group-centred HL definition: (a) to characterize HL from an asset-based perspective, (b) to consider HL as socially embedded and distributed, (c) to recognize that HL develops both in phases and in flexible ways, and (d) to consider the multimodal nature of health-related information. Further research is necessary to test the feasibility and applicability of the proposed definition and conceptual understanding in both research and practice.

Purpose This paper aims to challenge existing assumptions in talent management (TM) research, showcasing a misalignment between commonly held assumptions and the characteristics of the youth-intensive hospitality sector workforce. Design/methodology/approach Following a review of the TM literature, Piirto’s educational talent pyramid is adopted to conceptualize a recalibration. Drawing on multidisciplinary literatures (i.e. adolescent development, youth employment, positive psychology), and adopting a (talent) developmental approach, a reframing of prevalent TM discourses is enunciated based on the logic that the hospitality workforce is predominantly in a developmental state. Findings TM discourses are misaligned with the workforce composition of the hospitality industry, which is dominated by young, often unexperienced, workers. The need for dramatically recalibrated TM structures and underlying assumptions, centred around a greater attention to the “development” of talent and a more employee-focused and inclusive approach, can facilitate greater alignment between TM and hospitality. Research limitations/implications This paper extends a body of work advocating for more inclusive TM and developmental postures. The contribution, via a hospitality industry context, has been to create linkages between talent- and youth-development discourses. Practical implications This paper outlines a number of implications, among which are a pathway forward for hospitality industry to rebuild its poor HRM image and conversion of “transient” hospitality jobs to career jobs (for youth). Originality/value This paper identifies youth as a distinct workforce entity and suggests that hospitality jobs represent a critical developmental context for young people, resulting in a series of critical implications for TM practice and theorizing.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine the extent to which youth have ready access to alcohol and the extent to which immediate family influence affects consumption. Design/methodology/approach This qualitative descriptive exploratory study undertook semi-structured peer-group interviews with 20 participants from four New Zealand high schools. The interviews centred on exploring the “general” experiences of youth related to alcohol access – but with a focus on alcohol access “at home” and the parental role. Findings The study confirmed that the home unit was the main source of alcohol for most youth and parents were the most common source of provision. Parents provided financial access to alcohol by giving their child money to purchase it themselves through older family members or friends. It was also found that youth used negotiation strategies with their parents to influence their consumer purchases of alcohol. Research limitations/implications Youth frequently used strategies such as pressure tactics, exchange tactics, ingratiating tactics and consultation tactics to influence their family’s decision-making process and to pressure their parents into supplying them with alcohol. Practical implications It is important to recognise the role that family play as “gatekeepers” for readily allowing access and supplying youth with alcohol – and the reasons for doing so. Social implications Alcohol plays an important part in many societies. It is important to understand how young people consume and access alcohol – particularly when the family plays a major role in access and consumption. Originality/value Many studies have been conducted in relation to youth and alcohol consumption. Very few, as far as we can tell, explore the role of the family from the young consumers’ perspective and especially from a qualitative narrative perspective.

Adolescents 360 (A360) is a four-year initiative (2016–2020) to increase 15-19-year-old girls’ use of modern contraception in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Tanzania. The innovative A360 approach is led by human-centred design (HCD), combined with social marketing, developmental neuroscience, public health, sociocultural anthropology and youth engagement ‘lenses’, and aims to create context-specific, youth-driven solutions that respond to the needs of adolescent girls. The A360 external evaluation includes a process evaluation, quasi-experimental outcome evaluation, and a cost-effectiveness study. We reflect on evaluation opportunities and challenges associated with measuring the application and impact of this novel HCD-led design approach. For the process evaluation, participant observations were key to capturing the depth of the fast-paced, highly-iterative HCD process, and to understand decision-making within the design process. The evaluation team had to be flexible and align closely with the work plan of the implementers. The HCD process meant that key information such as intervention components, settings, and eligible populations were unclear and changed over outcome evaluation and cost-effectiveness protocol development. This resulted in a more time-consuming and resource-intensive study design process. As much time and resources went into the creation of a new design approach, separating one-off “creation” costs versus those costs associated with actually implementing the programme was challenging. Opportunities included the potential to inform programmatic decision-making in real-time to ensure that interventions adequately met the contextualized needs in targeted areas. Robust evaluation of interventions designed using HCD, a promising and increasingly popular approach, is warranted yet challenging. Future HCD-based initiatives should consider a phased evaluation, focusing initially on programme theory refinement and process evaluation, and then, when the intervention program details are clearer, following with outcome evaluation and cost-effectiveness analysis. A phased approach would delay the availability of evaluation findings but would allow for a more appropriate and tailored evaluation design.

Adolescents 360 (A360) is a four-year initiative (2016–2020) to increase 15-19-year-old girls’ use of modern contraception in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Tanzania. The innovative A360 approach is led by human-centred design (HCD), combined with social marketing, developmental neuroscience, public health, sociocultural anthropology and youth engagement ‘lenses’, and aims to create context-specific, youth-driven solutions that respond to the needs of adolescent girls. The A360 external evaluation includes a process evaluation, quasi-experimental outcome evaluation, and a cost-effectiveness study. We reflect on evaluation opportunities and challenges associated with measuring the application and impact of this novel HCD-led design approach. For the process evaluation, participant observations were key to capturing the depth of the fast-paced, highly-iterative HCD process, and to understand decision-making within the design process. The evaluation team had to be flexible and align closely with the work plan of the implementers. The HCD process meant that key information such as intervention components, settings, and eligible populations were unclear and changed over outcome evaluation and cost-effectiveness protocol development. This resulted in a more time-consuming and resource-intensive study design process. As much time and resources went into the creation of a new design approach, separating one-off “creation” costs versus those costs associated with actually implementing the programme was challenging. Opportunities included the potential to inform programmatic decision-making in real-time to ensure that interventions adequately met the contextualized needs in targeted areas. Robust evaluation of interventions designed using HCD, a promising and increasingly popular approach, is warranted yet challenging. Future HCD-based initiatives should consider a phased evaluation, focusing initially on programme theory refinement and process evaluation, and then, when the intervention program details are clearer, following with outcome evaluation and cost-effectiveness analysis. A phased approach would delay the availability of evaluation findings but would allow for a more appropriate and tailored evaluation design.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of moral conversations (MCs) within the context of youth justice as a potential resource for the process of change towards desisting from crime among a group of young offenders. It is centred on engagement with the perceptions and values of youth offenders in seeking to engage and work effectively with them, to consider in what ways the art of MCs and using askesis or practice to develop oneself can enable or constrain young people in their endeavours. Design/methodology/approach – Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 40 young offenders to ascertain their beliefs and values in relation to their attitude to offending. Findings – The research found that an examination of an individual’s worldview through a MC enables practitioners to identify the potential and motivation for change. It can identify both the enablers and barriers to change, and elicit a young person’s real attitudes to offending. Crucially, the research found that through this process individuals can begin to think more about the possibility of transformation and the steps needed to modify their offending behaviour, in order to move away from crime and to begin to implement an alternative future. Research limitations/implications – The research is based on a small sample of 40 young offenders. However, the findings suggest that further research should be conducted in this area. Social implications – The research raises questions about how the issue of beliefs and values in relation to young offenders is navigated within the youth justice system. Originality/value – The research examines an area of research that is often neglected and which has previously received little attention. The findings are of interest for academics and practitioners concerned with recidivism and the factors that contribute to changes in behaviour for young offenders.

Finland is trying to expedite and support young people?s transition to productive adulthood in various ways. Face-to-face guidance in multi-agency service points, the One-Stop Guidance Centers, has formed a central means for the last three governments. In these centres, a young person under the age of 30 can get help from different professionals in matters related to work, education and everyday life. This study asks how the centres define their tasks and target groups, and how the centres relate to the service reformation. The data consists of peer-learning surveys for the employees of the centres, conducted in 2015, 2016 and 2017.The research approach is inspired by membership categorisation analysis (MCA) pointing out that institutions think and act by means of categories: they produce client classifications and problem definitions, which define their service provision. The data analysis mixes MCA and content analysis. The centres have no dominant administrative sector or profession that would provide the target settings and categorisations to be directly applied in their work. Instead, these are negotiated inter-professionally and locally. The analysis shows that the employees reflect their task against the problems of the old service provision system. The centres want to stand apart from the bureaucratic and siloed service provision system as a youth-centred and holistic service. Developing a new way of working necessarily means questioning the conventional categories of clients and actions. Yet, the possibility to develop the ?new? varies between the professional groups and the geographic areas. The detailed and detached legislation of different administrative branches also delimit it.

The first aim of this research is to better understand how the dominant and vernacular literacy practices of adult volunteers at an aviation-centred uniformed youth group in Hong Kong co-exist through a newly launched continuing education programme – a vocational qualification programme – and various types of texts in the volunteering context. Another aim is to explore how these volunteers’ self-generated literacy practices are shaped by new technologies, with a particular focus on a social networking site, Facebook. The study is grounded in the framework of literacy as a social practice (Barton and Hamilton, 2012) and the community of practice (CoP) learning theory (Wenger, 1998). Literacy as a social practice theory reveals that reading and writing practices are purposeful and embedded in broader social goals and cultural practices. Taking a CoP perspective, this thesis also views the uniformed group as a community sharing common knowledge, ideas and practices. The research was conducted using a linguistic ethnographic approach. Based on the analysis of written texts, including assignments and texts related to volunteering work and multimodal texts on Facebook, interviews and participant observation, this study first reveals how the social practices surrounding these digital and print-based texts constitute the professional practices of volunteers and bring formal education into a nonformal education context. Furthermore, this thesis contributes to the understanding of new practices in social media and other technologies, which will become more prevalent in volunteering and further education environments. The significance of literacy practices cannot be considered in isolation from their unique sociocultural context.

Sufficient physical activity, a key prerequisite for health, is lacking in many teenagers. Limited knowledge, however, exists about who, when, why, and if New Zealand teenagers are getting their daily dose of health-related physical activity. At conception of this thesis, available information was predominantly survey-derived with no New Zealand data and few international studies that had assessed adolescent physical activity levels objectively. Data were collected from three projects. Convenience sampling was used across all projects to recruit students from low-decile high schools located in the Auckland region. For Project 1, 236 Year 9 to Year 13 students each wore a pedometer for five days (three weekdays and two weekend days) and reported their mode of transportation to and from school. To explore ethnic and sex-specific perceptions of physical activity among youth (i.e., barriers, benefits, potential physical activity enhancing strategies), Project 2 involved nine focus group discussions with 44 Year 9 and Year 10 students who identified as Māori or European. Project 3 was a large cross-sectional study of 3,451 high school students (Years 9 - 13) from seven low-decile schools. Through this project the following self-reported data were collected: demographics, physical activity levels during four school-day physical activity opportunities (i.e., active travel, lunchtime physical activity, recess physical activity, after-school physical activity), sedentary behaviour (i.e., school-day television (TV) watching), level of perceived encouragement to be active, and the presence of home policies regarding TV use. Analyses revealed low physical activity participation and high TV use behaviours. Pedometer data showed that only 14.5% of participants achieved a conservative criterion of 10,000 steps daily. Also, daily steps varied by age group (junior students: 11,079 ± 330; senior students: 9,422 ± 334), sex (males: 10,849 ± 381; females: 9,652 ± 289), time of week (weekday: 12,259 ± 287; weekend day: 8,241 ± 329), and transportation mode to/from school (walkers: 13,308 ± 483; car transit users: 10,986 ± 435). Low school-day physical activity levels emerged, especially during school hours (i.e., during recess and lunchtime). Based on dichotomised grouping (less active versus more active), the proportion of students in the ‘more active’ group during morning recess and lunchtime, after school, and as part of active travel to/from school were 26%, 32.4%, 56.3%, 58.1% respectively. Only 11.1% of participants were in the ‘more active’ group across all four physical activity opportunities. The focus group data revealed primarily social benefits of physical activity (e.g., meeting new people, fun). Barriers were mainly environment-related and included lack of peer support, low accessibility to and availability of physical activity opportunities, alternative sedentary activities, structure of physical education classes (females only), and distance between home and school (in terms of active transportation). Potential strategies to increase physical activity reflected the articulated barriers and benefits (e.g., increase peer support, parents to turn off the TV, organised activities at school, restructure physical education classes to allow student involvement in the decision-making process of class content). No ethnic and few sex differences in perceptions were found. Focusing on the verbalised importance of social support from the focus groups, Project 3 data showed that the strength of association between perceived encouragement from different support sources (i.e., parents, older siblings/cousins, peers, school) and physical activity participation varied by the physical activity opportunity examined. In particular, multivariate logistical regression showed reduced odds of being in the ‘more active’ group was associated with low parental encouragement (Juniors, OR: 0.47, 95% CI: 0.38-0.58; Seniors, OR: 0.41, 95% CI: 0.29-0.60) and low peer encouragement (Juniors, OR: 0.61, 95% CI: 0.51-0.74; Seniors, OR: 0.49, 95% CI: 0.35-0.69) for after-school physical activity, low peer encouragement (Juniors, OR: 0.39, 95% CI: 0.32-0.48; Seniors, OR: 0.41, 95% CI: 0.29-0.57) for lunchtime activity, and low peer encouragement (Juniors, OR: 0.78, 95% CI: 0.66-0.92) for active transportation (junior students only). No significant difference in physical activity was found between students who received high encouragement from two parents than students who reported high encouragement from their sole parent in a single parent family. Concentrating on the after-school period, Project 3 data were analysed to examined the relevance of the displacement hypothesis during this school-day period. The association between parental strategies (i.e., encouragement to be active and having TV limits) and youth after-school activity behaviours (i.e., hours spent viewing TV, physical activity participation) was also examined. Support for the displacement hypothesis emerged. In particular, compared to students who watched less than one hour of TV, those who watched greater than four hours of TV were half as likely to be in the more active group for after-school physical activity participation (adjusted OR: 0.51; 95% CI: 0.40-0.65). Comparing activity profile groups (i.e., based on combined TV use and after-school activity levels), compared to the participants in the ‘low TV/active’ group, participants in the other three activity groups (e.g., ‘high TV/low active’) were at least 1.28 times more likely to have parents that executed only one parental strategy and up to 4.77 times more likely to have parents that did not carry out either strategy. Substantive opportunities exist for youth to be active every day, and in different contexts and environments, yet a large proportion of young people are not maximising these opportunities to be active. If the health issue of inactivity is to be tackled in a comprehensive and efficient manner, a multi-strategy, multi-environment, coordinated approach among local authorities, government agencies, schools, families, and neighbourhoods is required to address the noted policy, physical, and social-related associates of an active lifestyle for youth. Future effort, whether in the form of strategy development, intervention work, or research, needs to be founded upon ecological theory, where both individual and a range of familial, social, and physical environmental factors (and there potential interactions) are considered. Lastly, equal research attention should be directed at improved physical activity levels, and just as importantly, reducing time youth spend in a sedentary state.

This chapter details a therapeutic method developed in Germany to illustrate some of the contested theoretical and practical issues involved in violence reduction, especially the potential pitfalls of an overly person-centred approach. Through an analysis of some of the therapeutic and educational methods employed, the authors try to provide a stimulus for further debate as to what ‘constructive confrontation’ might look like within the context of youth work practice.

Occupational therapists specialize in how pain impacts the development and maintenance of the occupations (self-care, productivity, leisure) of the daily lives of infants and youth in pain. Occupational therapists, working with families and other members of the health care team, use both generic and specific theoretical frameworks and models to guide clinical practice. These models ensure that a client-centred approach is used. In the everyday settings of the child, and using evidence-based practice, occupational therapists facilitate the treatment goals of children and families by integrating specific strategies, such as feeding, positioning, energy conservation, and adaptive equipment.

Lack of employment opportunities for young people is a major concern across Africa, and involves many policy areas. In Côte d’Ivoire, the situation is challenging because of political and economic crises that have beset the country in recent decades, impacting negatively on education and accentuating job insecurity, particularly among rural youth. Tackling the problem in rural areas requires a youth-centred approach that builds long-term, well-targeted and coordinated interventions based on young people’s lived experience.