News & Insights
VIDEO: Finding ways to track young people’s views in Europe
It is not as easy as it sounds.
Because they seldom participate in formal consultations, and are rarely keen to take time out to offer views to public bodies, the EU saw fit to organise a special project to explore the dynamics of this relationship.
It commissioned Brussels-based European Citizen Action Service (ECAS) to mount a project which they called Deep-linking Youth, and focused on young people’s views on learning-mobility programmes, notably Erasmus, and the idea was to observe social media messages to understand what young people thought about such initiatives.
The overriding principle was ‘we go to them’ rather than ‘they come to us’. It meant using new social listening techniques to ‘scrape’ the data, using Dutch social media management software called ‘Coosto’ and new ‘Discovery and Ethical Guidelines for Social Listening’ developed by Consultation Institute staff.
Two Project Reports have just been published:
o E-participation guidelines for decision-makers: Social listening through the digital dashboard
o Recommendations on Learning Mobility: Insights from the Digital Dashboard
In this short video, Rhion Jones discusses the project with Fraser Henderson, who led the Institute’s contribution to the Project.