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Young Lives Newsletter May 2023
Welcome to Young Lives latest newsletter!
We're delighted that after months of planning, Round 7 of our long running survey launches in Peru next month!
In this edition we spotlight the team's final preparations and bring you a round up of our latest news and updates - enjoy!
Breaking news - new funding!
Young Lives is delighted to announce a new partnership with The Wellcome Trust which will support our latest round of fieldwork.
The unprecedented combination of COVID-19, conflict and climate change is having a significant impact on young people’s lives, particularly those living in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), affecting their mental health.
This new funding will allow Young Lives to collect new data in Round 7 on young people's mental health and subjective wellbeing in addition to measuring the impact of the recent conflict in Ethiopia, which will underpin a comprehensive Young Lives research to policy impact programme in these areas.
We'll share more about this exciting work as it develops over the coming months.
Round 7 Spotlight
With the next round of our face to face data collection imminent, the global team is busy on the final preparations before launching the survey in our study countries on the following dates:
Peru - 12 June 2023
India - 31 July 2023
Ethiopia - 09 October 2023
Vietnam - 30 October 2023
We anticipate all fieldwork will be completed by March 2024.
An exceptional feature of Young Lives' study is the low attrition rate we achieve - for Round 7 we have been able to reconnect with 84-96% of our Round 5 sample, depending on their location. Overall 82% of the Round 1 respondents are still in the study 20+ years later!
For more about the work behind the survey, including survey questionnaires from earlier rounds, visit our website here. The Round 7 fieldwork manual and questionnaire will be available soon - watch this space!
The Peru and India teams are in the midst of the training phase. To prepare for the enumerator training and the fieldwork, the teams have been checking the questionnaire, standardising the enumerators' survey approach across the four countries and putting the correct safeguarding in place.
Researchers from Oxford joined the India and Ethiopia teams for these final stages:
Sophie von Russdorf und von Engelcken & Richard Freund report from Ethiopia:
"Before starting fieldwork, the team are pre-piloting new survey questions on education post COVID-19 pandemic, the job market, the effect of the recent conflict in Ethiopia and more. What they learn from this will be used to finalise the survey. There is a lot of excitement to find out what has happened in the lives of the young Ethiopians since the last round!"
Laura Ahlborn & Gerry McQuade report from India:
"One reason for the very low attrition rates is that many of the supervisors here have worked on the study since Round 1 and have built up such strong links with the respondents. 20 years on, having watched them grow up, they are really keen to see how they are navigating life as young adults in a post COVID-19 world"
And Young Lives India Team partners Revathi Ellanki and P. Prudhvikar Reddy feed back:
"We enjoyed animated discussions during the training workshop about the new survey questions – for example on the impact of COVID-19 on education and work, the labour market, as well as psychosocial issues, executive function and work-related training"
We will now go on to conduct similar training in Ethiopia and Vietnam.
Young Lives Open Access Data - latest now available
A unique feature of Young Lives study is that our survey data are available open access. The data from Calls 4 and 5 of our pandemic Phone Survey have now been archived and are available from the UK Data Service along with the data from the first three calls.
The constructed files, which combine subsets of variables from Calls 1 – 5 of the Phone Survey are also now archived with the UK Data Service. Support for researchers on using these constructed files is available in our latest Technical Note, 'A Guide to Listening to Young Lives at Work Calls 1 to 5 Constructed Files
Young Lives Qualitative Work - Peru
Our latest wave of qualitative fieldwork has just been completed in Peru! This is the fifth time we've visited the smaller qualitative sample for in-depth interviews. We visited young people from both the younger cohort (now age 22) and the older cohort (age 29) in four of the 20 Young Lives Peru clusters and conducted interviews and focus groups to better understand the life trajectories and wellbeing of young people in Peru.
New Publications
Journal article - Perez-Alvarez, M., Favara, M. Children having children: early motherhood and offspring human capital in India. Journal of Population Economics 36, 1573-1606 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-023-00946-0
In this article, the authors use Young Lives India data to investigate the effect of young motherhood on children's outcomes. They find that children born to young mothers are shorter for their age, especially for girls born to very young mothers. They also found evidence suggesting that children born to very young mothers have lower maths ability.
Blog - 'Food for Thought? Evidence from young lives sheds new light on the impact of Ethiopia’s PSNP for children’s foundational cognitive skills'
In March we published a blog about the impact of the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) in Ethiopia on children's foundational cognitive skills. It's proved popular - our most viewed blog to date this year! We’re really pleased that UKFIET re-published the blog this month.
Events & Engagements
Event - 'Diálogos Hacia la construcción de un Sistema de Protección Social en el Perú, UNICEF' (Dialogues Towards the Construction of a Social Protection System in Peru)
Young Lives Peru joined this event set up to prepare a proposal for a national agenda to inform regional and international actions around social protection. Along with other presenters, Young Lives shared relevant research findings and programme suggestions, with a particular focus on the inclusion of the most vulnerable.
Ethiopian engagements
Young Lives' Country Director in Ethiopia recently held meetings with key stakeholders - British Embassy, UNICEF and the UN Development Program - to discuss Young Lives' latest research findings and policy recommendations.
Vacancies at Young Lives - closing date June 4th!
Are you interested in working with the Young Lives research study team to produce a high standard of internationally disseminated work?
We have three vacancies for those who want to join us! We are looking for a Quantitative Research Officer; and two Quantitative Research Assistants. Click on the links to find details on how to apply. Please share with your contacts.
Coming Up
- New research and policy recommendations on gender and skills development.
- Blog on the impact of climate change on children in Vietnam
and more!
If you have any questions or comments about this newsletter please contact Young Lives Communications Manager - julia.tilford@qeh.ox.ac.uk.
