Thursday 28th November 2024, 13:30–15:00 (Australia/Melbourne), Sutherland Room
This workshop will introduce the GENERATION survey, a new longitudinal study of young people in Australia. Beginning with a national survey of Year 10 students and their schools in 2022, GENERATION provides nationally consistent data on the complexity of youth transitions from school to post-school destinations. GENERATION tracks the interests, hopes and aspirations of young people across Australia in order to shape educational policy for future generations of Australian students. GENERATION is planned to run for a decade, surveying young people annually until they are 25 years of age in 2032. Wave 1 and Wave 2 data is now available to download from the Australian Data Archive.
Data collection for GENERATION began in 2022 with both a Young People’s Survey and a School Context Survey. A representative sample of around 26,000 Year 10 students (around 15 years of age) from over 300 schools participated in Wave 1. This includes over 15,000 fully completed surveys. Over 6,500 young people agreed to be re-contacted after Wave 1, with over 3,500 young people participating in Wave 2 and over 4,000 participating in Wave 3. To accompany the young people’s survey, we also collected data from 259 secondary schools around Australia.
The GENERATION Young People’s Survey provides insights into young people’s career intentions and choices in senior secondary school; educational pathways through school and beyond; engagement of young people as active and informed members of the community; policy and educational factors influencing choices, engagement and outcomes in education and employment; the impact of disadvantage on transitions and pathways; and, the impact of COVID-19 on the cohort as they progress over coming years.
The School Context Survey acted as a supplementary data gathering tool to the Young People’s survey and is linked to school administrative data. The objective of the survey was to collect information about school-based programs and interventions intended to enhance student career pathways, improve student outcomes, and understand how the Pandemic impacted on the school and delivery of programs for the student cohort.
This workshop is designed to provide prospective data users with an overview of the survey design and implementation. It will explore some of the key methodologies used in the GENERATION study. We will provide an overview of accessing and using the data, including an introduction to the documentation, survey weights, longitudinal sample response rates, and data linkages. Key survey items and constructs will be discussed, including standardised measures of student’s career interests, social-emotional skills, and school belonging. We will also highlight some key findings from Wave 1 and Wave 2.
Three members of the GENERATION team will present this session: Professor Ben Edwards (Principal Investigator), Dr Jessica Arnup (Research Fellow), and Kate Doery (Senior Survey Research Officer).
Kate Doery is the Senior Survey Research Officer on the GENERATION Study, a longitudinal study of young people in Australia as they transition to life beyond school. Kate is interested in community-engaged research. She mainly works with young people and prioritises their voices in her work. Much of Kate's work focuses on knowledge translation practices, making research accessible beyond academia. Kate has worked on developing data stories and translating research findings for policy and practice on both the GENERATION and What Australia Thinks Websites.