Wirkungsnachweis aus der Literatur

Mittelfristig (1 bis 5 Jahre)
Meso (Organisation/Gruppe)
Sozial

adverse effect of impact monitoring practices on the relationship between young people and youth workers

Beziehungsaufbau und Interaktiosfähigkeiten

youth work relationships can be particularly powerful, sometimes constituting a young person’s first ‘chosen’ relationship with an adult – and yet they are also fragile, particularly in the early stages. The following quote articulates powerfully how the very recording of an outcome might disrupt the nature of a youth work encounter: "You sit down with a kid and you have a really meaningful conversation with them and you’re like, ‘Now can you fill in this sheet and tell me-’, it’s like it completely undermines everything that you’ve just done … ‘You’ve only just had that conversation with me about my life and the different issues I’ve got at the moment so you can record it? So it looks like you’re a decent youth worker? Is that it?’ It’s, yeah, bullshit." (Alan) Young people ‘saw through’ monitoring systems, aware that these mechanisms were used to assess workers and organisations rather than to improve services. Youth workers spoke about young people’s resistance to paperwork and computerised monitoring systems [...] In this and other accounts, young people found questionnaires tedious and intrusive and only reluctantly agreed to fill them in; and workers felt obliged to trade on their relationships with young people in order to gain their compliance. While impact enthusiasts argue that evaluation can be embedded within projects and made creative and even fun (Stuart, Maynard, and Rouncefield 2015), this is not necessarily how it is experienced and enacted in practice, particularly in the most informal youth settings. In repeated accounts and in observations, young people refused or delayed the filling out of forms. Youth workers apologised, negotiated, persuaded, cajoled and bribed, providing rewards such as pizza, trips, motorcycle training and even financial incentives in exchange for turning up, filling out forms and producing documents.

Beschreibung der Aktivität

youth work activities in a variety of organisations including local authority youth services, charities and social enterprises
youth work activities in a variety of organisations including local authority youth services, charities and social enterprises
Großbritannien
PraktikerInnen/ JugendarbeiterInnen/ MentorInnen
PraktikerInnen/JugendarbeiterInnen/MentorInnen

Evaluierung der Aktivität

Qualitative Interviewbefragungen (persönlich), Fokusgruppen
The data was collected over a period of three years between early 2011 and late 2013 through in-depth semi-structured interviews and focus groups involving 35 youth workers in different areas of England, alongside ethnographically-informed participant observation in two youth organisations in East London. [...] Twenty-two youth workers took part in semi-structured, in-depth interviews of between one and three hours in length. These interviews took place in their workplaces or local cafés, using an open conversational approach inspired by feminism, ethnography and grounded theory, in which the interviewee is given space to shape the interview (Oakley 1990; Hammersley and Atkinson 1995; Charmaz 2006).
35 youth workers
early 2011 to late 2013