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Research on youth work in Croatia, Italy, Latvia and Lithuania

Research on youth work in Croatia, Italy, Latvia and Lithuania represents the final step of a research activity on youth work within “Youth Work HD” project, funded by Erasmus+,  in four partner countries: Croatia, Italy, Latvia and Lithuania.

The process that brought to the finalization of the 4 national reports involved:

  • a desk research on Open Educational Resources for youth workers,
  • an online questionnaire survey for the self-assessment of competences in the four main thematic areas covered by the project and
  • a series of focus groups for the validation and integration of the results obtained with the previous two phases of the research.

These activities were carried out by gathering data, documents and information with respect to the following specific areas:

  • Cooperation with relevant stakeholders,
  • Policy impact/influence,
  • Reaching out to young people,
  • Usage/exploitation of digital tools

An online survey for Youth Workers has been carried out from December 2016 until February 2017. The project’s partners have widely disseminated the questionnaire both at National and European level, and it had reached 505 feedbacks from youth workers mostly located in one of the countries represented by the consortium, with an average age of 35/36 years old (78% female and 22% male).

Research was focused on:

  • their training needs for improving the impact and the quality of the work done with the youngsters;
  • their learning preferences with a particular focus on online environments and blended approaches.

Based on the analysis of the data collected with the online survey, the most urgent action is to provide advanced training opportunities in order increase the competence level of youth workers around Europe, thus promoting a more qualified and professional offer to European youths.  40% of the respondents selected “Reaching out to young people” as an aspect that is more critical and/or important for the quality of their present work with youths, 28% selected “Cooperation with relevant stakeholders”, 19% of the respondents selected  “Usage/exploitation of digital tools” and only 11% selected “Policy impact/influence”.

The second main part of the questionnaire has been structured in order to investigate on the learning preferences of interviewed youth workers. More than 250 participants stated that in the eLearning platform of the Youth Work HD project they would perfer training that: is interactive, is integrated with work you do with youths, is fun and easy to use, allows collaboration with other participants, is in mother tounge and provides certificatesincludes good practices and references for additional information.

More about desk research and focus groups (and the rest of the report) is available here and if you want to know more about Croatian part of the research, read here.

Published in POLICIES