Tool: Collecting information about adolescents

Consider the following strategies for investigating adolescents’ situations as you design or adapt your intervention with the Adolescent Kit.

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1. Review existing information about adolescents

Review information about adolescents that has already been collected through situation analyses, surveys and assessments. Studies in the programme areas of child protection, education, gender, conflict, HIV/AIDS and reproductive rights may also have useful data about adolescent girls and boys.

2. Collect information about adolescents through other sectors

Integrate questions about adolescents into humanitarian studies that are planned or underway, such as multi-sector needs assessments, baseline studies or situation analyses.

3. Collect your own information

Collect your own information to fill in any information gaps. Make sure that you:

Gather disaggregated data on the number of adolescent girls, boys, different age groups, those with and without disabilities and those from different ethnic groups, religions, language groups, clans, or other groups in the community.

Vary your information-gathering approaches: Use a combination of house-to-house surveys, focus groups, key informant interviews and other kinds of consultations. House-to-house surveys are often an effective way to find less visible adolescents, such as children who are married or who have disabilities. Focus groups and other consultative activities are useful for learning about adolescents’ daily lives and physical, social and cultural contexts.

Adapt your data collection tools to the context so that they are useful and appropriate. Work with community members and adolescents to ensure that questions are clear, don’t cause embarrassment, offense, or put respondents at risk. Define terms such as adolescents carefully especially when seeking to reach and engage those ages 10-17, as communities may consider some young people in this age group as adults.

Work with adolescents! Adolescents can:

• Find less visible adolescents in their communities: Adolescents often know more about their peers than adults or other community members do, and may be better able to find other adolescent girls and boys who are less visible.
• Suggest different ways to gather information: Adolescents may have creative ways of finding out about their peers, particularly regarding issues that are unfamiliar to adults.
• Help to collect data: Adolescents can help to collect data about other adolescents through surveys, focus groups and consultations. They can suggest questions to include, interpret responses and provide useful insights into the information collected.

4. Analyze your data and look for significant patterns

Compare your data on adolescents with data from the rest of the population in the area. Look for any unusual trends, especially for low counts within particular groups of adolescents. Unusual patterns may reflect gaps in your research process, or risks confronting adolescents. For example, if the number of adolescents in a particular group (e.g. those of certain ages, ethnicity or gender), is low compared to the rest of the population, this may indicate that they are disappearing or face specific threats – such as recruitment in armed forces and groups.

5. Use the findings to design your intervention with the Adolescent Kit

Use your findings to help you to decide which adolescent girls and boys to target with your intervention, which goals to focus on and how to design your activities and approaches.

6. Share findings with other humanitarian actors

Share your findings about adolescents with others involved in their support and care, such as child protection, education, health, HIV/AIDS, nutrition, WASH and other actors (in line with confidentiality guidelines). This is particularly important if you identify significant risks to particular groups of adolescents.

7. Do no harm!

Be sure to adhere to all ethical considerations when gathering and sharing information about children and to uphold the Minimum Standards for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action, established by the Global Protection Cluster of the Child Protection Working Group 2012.