D4.1. YouCount open data sample from the evaluation – current stand

The H2020 YouCount project runs from February 2021 to January 2024. The overarching objectives are to generate new knowledge and innovations to increase the social inclusion of youth through co-creative youth citizen social science (Y-CSS) and to provide evidence of the actual outcomes of Y-CSS. Multiple case studies—consisting of 10 co-creative Y-CSS projects with young citizen scientists (YCS) aged between about 13-29 years old across nine countries in Europe—will provide knowledge about the positive drivers of social inclusion in general. The cases will further produce knowledge as well as innovations in relation to social participation, social belonging, and citizenship.

The YouCount evaluation design for process and outcome evaluation of Y-CSS is a multi-method approach that spans across the whole duration of the project and is carried out by the WP4 of UNIVIE. It therefore is to be classified as current work in progress, as some methods only just have been implemented and will be analyzed in the future, to estimated cross-case comparisons. The deliverable aims at making the research design, as well as the current stand of the evaluative studies, transparent and publicly available. This happens in the spirit of open science, with the goal of doing “Science for and with Society”. Hereby outlined is the theoretical design, the way of carrying it out, and the current stand of each study implementation in the overall project.

Moreover, the D4.1 includes open data regarding the outcome methodology (pre-survey questionnaire) and a sav.file with a sample of open data collected from the current pre-survey data. See more details in the report. The attached sav.-file can provide knowledge about the used variables, to estimate occurring answering patterns very roughly, ad to familiarize with the implementation of such a pre-post-survey. However, it is to be noted that this data set is exemplary, anonymized and potentially also not complete yet and must be handled and used accordingly. Due to the relatively low number of participants (yet), this research is to be characterized as early stage research and only depicts a moment in time. This being said, the YouCount project is designed to gather a huge quantity of data that promises a variety of concrete research outputs, so future data samples will be richer for in-depth analyses. At this point, more quantitative as well as qualitative data is needed to estimate real impacts of Y-CSS in all its facettes.