Developing a self-report measure for young people

The importance of capturing a child/young person’s voice in Youth Justice has been highlighted in both policy and research. The Strategic Framework for Youth Justice in Northern Ireland (2022-2027), states that the ‘criminal justice system should ensure children’s rights are respected at all times and will align to international standard’ (YJA, 2022, p. 12), while the National Youth Justice Strategy in the Republic of Ireland (2021-2027) states young people should have an opportunity to have their voices included (DOJ Ireland, 2021). Both frameworks align with Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN, 1989), which states that all children and young people capable of forming views should have the opportunity to have those views seriously considered in any decisions that affect them.

The SLSSHub are developing a brief, pragmatic self-report measure for young people. The purpose of this self-report measure is to include proximal outcomes as captured by the voice of young people. These types of outcomes have also been referred to as ‘change levers’ in some research and are shown to impact offending behaviour in youth antisocial behaviour programmes (Wilson & Lipsey, 2024). These outcomes can give us an insight that helps us to understand the mechanisms behind changed behaviour and outcomes that work.

Measures completed by professionals for a young person, such as the YLS/CMI, provide valuable insight; building on this, incorporating a complementary self-report measure for young people will provide additional insights. As such, this self-report measure will further support the work done with the YLS/CMI by providing an additional lens on many of the factors that would appear in both.

The aims of the measure are:
• To provide an evidence & policy informed self-report measurement tool for young people.
• To be developed as an all-island, cross border initiative.
• The aim is for the measure to be developed in conjunction with practitioner, researcher, and policy maker input.