Exploring care-experienced young people’s perceptions of the use of administrative data in research

Abstract

Objective and Approach
Data about people is generated every day and research based on administrative data, especially in the social care sector, is becoming more prevalent. This piece of work involves running a public engagement workshop alongside care-experienced young people with the aim to learn what young people understand when researchers say they will be using administrative data in their research. 

Results 
The following questions will be explored:

• What is understood by the terms ‘administrative data’ and ‘data linkage’?


• What are young people’s thoughts on how their data is used?


• What would they like to know about how their data is being used?


• Can they think of reasons why you would not want their data to be used?


• Do they think that the data that is collected (from a social worker, GP, etc.) accurately reflects their experiences?

As well as this, important aspects of the collection of administrative data will be discussed.

Conclusions
The output of this piece of work will be an infographic. The aim is that this infographic will contain two facets. First, it will illustrate how administrative data is collected and used (including a life cycle of the data). Second, it will contain information that young people regard as pertinent to this topic and will contain quotes ‘for young people, for young people’. 

Implications
The infographic from this work can be used by other researchers as part of their own public engagement work with young people.