Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The research objectives may be summarized as follows: to identify the aids and obstacles to the successful progression to adult life that affect young people between the ages of 16 and 25 living in the North-East of England, and to put young people at the centre of the research and give them a voice through a programme of personal interviews; to study low achievers and potential drop-outs from national youth surveys by collecting new data on this group of young people who generally do not respond to cohort surveys, and whose absence from the resulting data has unbalanced the conclusions drawn from it; to compare the augmented sample with results obtained by research partners in continental Europe, and evaluate the methodology of direct compensation for survey drop-out and attrition by targeted re-sampling of typical non-respondents; to identify and assess the impact of local, regional and national structures on the life chances of the young people in the survey, and describe the ways in which changes in policy affect their opportunities; to disseminate the results of this research in a way that assures accessibility to non-academic as well as academic users, and to interpret them in a way which will encourage their integration into future initiatives.

Main Topics:

The 'Routes' dataset comprises sixteen sections. It contains information on the progression experiences of 502 young people between the ages of 16 and 25 years living in the North-East of England at the turn of the twentieth century. The first sections list all the activities each respondent undertook after leaving school, their qualifications and their experience of school. The final section covers personal and socio-economic details. The central sections look in detail at respondents' experiences in all the activities they listed. The interview schedules were based on questions asked in the Youth Cohort Survey, and the dataset contains therefore a mix of quantitative and qualitative data. Initial 'coding down' of verbal responses, additional comments and interviews has remained as true to the sense of the original remarks as possible. In some cases this has produced extensive coding frames to which the application of traditional statistical methods would not be productive.

No sampling (total universe)

Face-to-face interview