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The purpose of this paper is to explore young people’s conceptions of political information. The study sought to identify what political information sources young people encounter, how they construe these sources and the messages they communicate, and how the information experiences of young people may be better understood to inform information literacy interventions to support the development of political agency.

Using personal construct theory as a conceptual framework, repertory grid (RG) interviews were used to explore the different ways in which 23 young people aged 14-15 from a town in Northern England conceive of political information and how they evaluate its quality and authority.

The study identified the sources of information young people engage with for finding and receiving what they understand as political information. The results from the RG interviews indicated that young people use a wide range of sources of political information to become informed about politics and the world around them. These sources of information include family, friends, teachers, television news, newspapers, radio shows, comedy shows, social media and community meetings. Participants were aware that they passively encounter information sources as well as actively engage in debate and discussion with other sources. Some participants had difficulty critically evaluating the political information sources they encounter. The nature of young people’s experiences of political information varied greatly. The degree of complexity in the experiences of political information varied not only between participants but was also dependent on their particular relationship with the information sources under scrutiny.

The paper has implications for personal construct analysis as a research approach broadly, from the point of view of its use within library and information science research. It is the first study to apply the personal construct approach to the study of young people’s political information use and to consider implications for information literacy support that would have been difficult to access using other approaches.

The paper provides insight into an understudied area; that of young people’s conceptions of political information. This insight may be used to inform the improvement of political information provision and information literacy support for young people.

A deeper understanding of the different ways in which young people identify, engage with and use information for political purposes may contribute to a clearer understanding of young people’s information needs, ideally leading to improved political education and a strengthened democratic process.

The paper explores a relatively under-researched area of library and information science research, and does so using a relatively under-used method in the domain. Insights into the perceived characteristics of different sources of political information are novel and contribute to the development of information behaviour and information literacy fields in terms of information for empowerment and democracy.

Children and young people’s time is generally structured by adults’ ideas and interests, be it in the family (sleeping or eating times), in the social world (time of school) or in the cultural realm (holidays and festivities). Children’s autonomy of how they spend their time is reduced to certain spaces, which again are assigned to them by adults. For the past two decades, digital media has entered many people’s – adults as well as children’s and young people’s – everyday life.

With the omnipresent and growing use of digital media by young people – fueled even more by mobile devices – grows a discourse around possible (negative) effects and supposedly necessary pedagogical monitoring and restrictions of their digital media time.

These discussions regarding negative effects on well-being and school performance include formal recommendations for limiting the quantity of time spent online. Hereby, mainly the digital time outside school is addressed and potentially problematized. Despite numerous studies on the effects of digital media time on different aspects of young people’s lives there is little research asking for children’s and young people’s perspectives on digital media use and time.

This study uses questionnaires (509) and qualitative interviews (15) to explore young people’s perspectives in terms of meaning, quality and quantity of the time spent with digital media. The participants were youth aged 12–20 from northern Germany. Using qualitative content analysis, findings point to a necessary differentiation between the purpose of usage, respective effects and evaluations.

Accordingly, being online can be an act (a) of self-actualization including positive effects creating great meaning for well-being, identity and appropriation of the digital world for their own future, (b) a waste of time when, for example, using social media or gaming to pass the time including a feeling that time is accelerated and rushing, personal regrets and references to loss of control and the need for self-control, and (c) a pragmatic naturalization of the digital as one part of life for various individual or social purposes and developments.

The article discusses young people’s evaluations and perspectives addressing the possibly artificial adult differentiation of analog and digital time or activities as well as adults’ presumptions about young people’s digital time and the strive for control resulting from these. Additionally, insights from the circumstances of the COVID-19 lockdown are included in gaining knowledge about what is actually important and rewarding when young people spend time digitally. The chapter aims at an intergenerational understanding of the significance of digital media in young people’s lives questioning alarmist scenarios of a generation that is lost in the digital world.

The research reported here forms part of a study of children’s participation in children in care reviews and decision making in one local authority in England. The purpose of this paper is to outline the views of 11 social workers and 8 Independent Reviewing Officers (IROs) and explores their perceptions of children’s participation in reviews. The paper considers the barriers to young people participating meaningfully in decision making and how practice could be improved in this vital area so that children’s voices are more clearly heard and when possible acted upon by professionals.

The data reported here derive from a qualitative cross-sectional study in one English local authority. The entire study involved interviewing children in care, IROs, social workers and senior managers about young people’s participation in their reviews. Findings from the interviews with young people and senior managers have been reported elsewhere (Diaz and Aylward, 2018; Diaz et al., 2018); this paper focusses on the interviews with social workers and IROs. Specifically, the authors were interested in gaining insight into their views about the following research questions: To what degree do children and young people meaningfully participate in reviews? What are the barriers to participation? What can be done to improve children and young people’s participation in reviews?

During this process seven themes were identified, five of which concerned barriers to effective participation and two which concerned factors that appeared to support effective participation. These are summarised below and explained further in the following sections. Barriers to effective participation: social workers and IROs’ high caseloads and ensuing time pressures; high turnover of social workers and inexperienced staff; lack of understanding and training of professionals in participation; children and young people’s negative experiences of reviews and consequent reticence in taking part; and structure and process of the review not being child-centred. Factors which assist participation: quality of the relationship between the child and professionals; and the child or young person chairing their own review meeting.

Although these findings reflect practice in one local authority, their consistency with other research in this area suggests that they are applicable more widely.

The practice of children chairing their own reviews was pioneered by The Children’s Society in North West England in the 1990s (Welsby, 1996), and has more recently been implemented with some success by IROs in Gloucestershire (see Thomas, 2015, p. 47). A key recommendation from this study would be for research to explore how this practice could be developed and embedded more widely. Previous research has noted the tension between the review being viewed as an administrative process and as a vehicle of participation (Pert et al., 2014). This study highlighted practitioner reservations about young people chairing their own reviews, but it also gave examples of how this had been done successfully and how it could improve children’s participation in decision making. At the very least, it is essential that young people play a role in deciding where the review is going to take place, when it will take place, who is going to be invited and what will be included on the agenda.

The paper highlights that in this Local Authority caseloads for social workers were very high and this, combined with a high turnover of staff and an inexperienced workforce, meant that children in care struggled to have a consistent social worker. This often meant that young people were not able to build up a positive working relationship with their social worker, which negatively impacted on their ability to play a meaningful role in decision making.

There have been very few recent studies that have considered professionals’ perspectives of children’s participation in key meetings and decision making, so that this provides a timely and worthwhile contribution to this important area of work.

Research to date has identified young people's perspectives on a number of health‐related topics such as smoking, alcohol, sexual health, physical activity and healthy eating. Whilst this body of research draws important attention towards young people's views on topical health concerns, it arguably remains located within a pre‐defined agenda; thereby marginalising young people's own, and potentially different, frames of reference when discussing health. In light of this omission, the aim of this paper is to examine young people's own understandings of health in line with their own frames of reference.

Data were collected from 55 young people aged 15‐16 years through group discussions, individual interviews and observational data in a school and surrounding community settings. Key themes were analysed for their implications for “emic” conceptualisations of health. Young people's perspectives were further compared with accounts given by professionals.

Two key themes emerged from young people's accounts: being happy and having fun. Young people's meanings of being happy highlighted the relational components of developing a positive self‐belief, pointing to a number of socially located prerequisites for promoting their health. Discussions of having fun were understood as potentially liberating, resistive and subversive, but which exist in some tension with adults’ discourses of risk and risk‐taking.

Examining young people's accounts points to the possibility of a more positive discourse on health – opening up new opportunities and insights for health promotion informed by concepts of empowerment.

In this chapter, we will look at how the indirect approach can enable us to find a way to learn about young people's lives. The setting for this chapter is informal youth work, reminding us of the value of a wide range of practices with young people, and the findings are equally relevant to formal and informal education as guiding principles for good practice. We will look at the skillful interactions practitioners establish with young people and how they can be developed and promoted. Reflective practice for practitioners is identified as beneficial in adding the value of young people's voice, whilst building relationships. The nature of young people's participation and power is argued to benefit from a co-constructed and socio-cultural understanding; majoring on the importance of context, indirect method and equality literacy framework. We will suggest how the indirect approach can improve young people's lives in schools and/or youth provision.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relevance of young people ' s experiences of mental health interventions with Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) before and during their time with youth offending services.

This qualitative interpretive study involved 14 interviews with young people who had offended, five of their carers and five CAMHS professionals from one local authority.

The paper identifies understanding, recognition, respect and trust as key principles in the practitioner-young person relationship, and in the intervention process more broadly, and suggests that systematic consultation with young people and their caregivers about their experience of mental health interventions would be beneficial. It notes important similarities and differences in the views of the different parties which shed further light on reasons why a young person may or may not engage with mental health services.

The study is based on a small sample of young people from one service, but it is hoped that the findings will be a useful springboard for other services to reflect upon.

The paper proposes the importance of recognising young people ' s agency in the intervention process and the value of systematic consultation with young people and their caregivers for securing their engagement in interventions.

The study takes a multi-perspective approach (of young people, their carers and practitioners) to capture the synergies and tensions in the expectations of and interactions between young people, practitioners and caregivers.

Government policy places strong emphasis on the value of school‐based drug education, and offers guidelines around the development of appropriate drug education. This paper is based on research conducted with 575 young people via a questionnaire survey which sought to obtain their views on what constitutes effective drug education. Findings included strong support from young people for school‐based drug education; suggested roles for parents, ex‐drug users, friends and youth workers in drug education; a desire for clear facts about drugs and drug use in order to enable young people to make informed decisions; support for the use of interactive teaching methods; and the need for drug education to start in primary school. These findings highlight the potential value of involving young people in the development of drug education in order to ensure maximum engagement in and learning from school‐based drug education programmes.

The purpose of this paper is to present young people's attitudes to peace‐walls in Belfast and whether they feel that these peace‐walls should be temporary or permanent structures.

The methodology is based on questionnaire responses from 125 young people between the ages of 14 and 15 from six schools located in areas in Belfast where Catholics and Protestants live side by side yet apart. The paper is also based on their responses to photo prompts, focus group discussions and images of peace‐walls drawn by some of the young people.

The young people produced six discourses on peace‐walls in Belfast and these are outlined in the paper.

The paper endorses the necessity of incorporating young people's views of peace‐walls in Belfast as a prelude to finding ways in which to challenge taken‐for‐granted assumptions about the legacy of the conflict in Northern Ireland.

The paper is original in that it addresses the neglect of young people's views on peace‐walls in Belfast and contributes to further understanding of the importance of capturing young people's spatial strategies in divided cities.

This chapter draws on data from a qualitative study examining the extent to which children and young people age 7 to 17 are able to participate and influence matters affecting them in their home, school, and community. It was commissioned by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs in Ireland to inform the National Strategy on Children and Young People’s Participation in Decision-Making, 2015–2020. Utilising Lundy’s (2007) conceptualisation of Article 12 of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and Leonard’s (2016) concept of generagency, this chapter will examine children and young people’s everyday lives and relationships within the home and family in the context of agency and structure.

In the study, home was experienced by children generally as the setting most facilitative of their voice and participation in their everyday lives reflecting research findings that children are more likely to have their initiative and ideas encouraged in the family than in school or their wider communities (Mayall, 1994). Key areas of decision-making included everyday consumption activities such as food, clothes, and pocket money as well as temporal activities including bed-time, leisure, and friends. This concurs with Bjerke (2011) that consumption of various forms is a major field of children’s participation. Positive experiences of participation reported by children and young people involved facilitation by adults whom they respected and with whom they had some rapport. This locates children as relational beings, embedded in multiple overlapping intergenerational processes and highlights the interdependency between children’s participation and their environment (Leonard, 2016; Percy-Smith & Thomas, 2010).

Mental health of children and young people is often discussed in terms of mental illness, however, such an approach is limited. The purpose of this paper is to explore young people's views of what mental health is and how to stay mentally healthy.

The paper investigated young people's views on these two issues through a series of workshops. In total 218, 13-year-old schoolchildren produced posters with their impressions of the issues. Themes that young people identified were then discussed with them in terms of the existing Bright Futures definition of mental health. Poster responses were subsequently transcribed and thematically analysed.

The paper identified a number of themes for each question. Mental health was viewed in terms of personal attributes of an individual, illness, ability for personal management and establishing social relations. Young people saw mental health maintained through a combination of lifestyle choices, personal attributes, management of self and environment, social support and relationships, as well as treatment of illness. These themes corresponded to the ones identified by the Bright Futures.

This study highlights the complexity of young people's views on the meaning of mental health. They were also more positive, open and competent in discussing mental health than previously suggested. However, a more systematic investigation of views and attitudes is necessary, including younger children. Additionally, health care professionals are likely to benefit from young people's engagement in planning and implementing strategies for better mental health.

This paper is one of the few to investigate the positive meaning of mental health with young people.