Prestigious £250k grant to research the social impact of COVID-19 on young people

RESEARCHERS at the University of Huddersfield, Professor Barry Percy-Smith and Dr Leanne Monchuk, are working with Ecorys on a prestigious research grant awarded by the Nuffield Foundation to understand how the COVID-19 crisis affects children and young people’s everyday lives.

The research is being led by Ecorys’ Research Director Laurie Day. Ecorys has a global reputation as an international provider of research, consulting, programme management and communications services.

Over the next 18 months, the joint research team from the two organisations will recruit and train young people as co-researchers, supporting them to document their family lives, peer relationships, education and their roles in society as the pandemic unfolds.

The research will take place in seven countries and will be conducted entirely online, using virtual forms of communication to mirror young people’s changing modes of social interaction during the crisis, such as blogs/vlogs, photos, videos, diaries and interviews. Young people will also be involved in ongoing analysis and reporting.

The team will compare young people’s experiences from the four nations of the UK, to those of their peers in Italy, the original epicentre of the European outbreak.

Other countries taking part are Singapore, where SARS is still within memory and where the response to COVID-19 has centred on contract-tracing and Lebanon, where a fragile civil society and quarantine for refugee children have particular implications for the pandemic.

The study will provide findings to inform the development of appropriate tools and measures to safeguard child well-being and children’s rights during the crisis. The main outputs will include interim and final research reports, alongside online briefings and blog posts aimed at the general public, professionals, public authorities and NGOs.

A final report on the research is due to be published September 2021.

For more information about the Nuffield Foundation project (WEL/FR-000022571) go to: http://nuffieldfoundation.org/project/growing-up-under-covid-19.

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