EYCA presents: the EYCAdemy
Training young people to find out what other young people think!

Statistics only tell half the story. Statistics can tell us how many? and how much? and how often? but they can’t answer the bigger, all-important question: why?

Quantitative v. Qualitative
Quantitative research is straightforward: all you have to do it distribute surveys/questionnaires, persuade people to tick the boxes, count the answers, calculate the averages and hey presto! you have the answers to how much, how many and how often.

But you still don’t know why.

The European Youth Card Association (EYCA) is interested in knowing what young people think and why they think those things, so we looked for a way to conduct qualitative research.

Our solution was focus group research, where selected groups (according to age, gender, nationality, etc) are brought together with specially trained moderators to talk on specific themes and answer specific questions. And so began Youth Builds Europe in 2003, a highly successful pilot project that gathered the quality research we were looking for.

EYCAdemy: a permanent research tool
Building on the success of Youth Builds Europe, EYCA launched a new project in January 2005, the EYCAdemy, in order to establish a permanent structure for youth research. It has done this by establishing a European-wide panel of youth researchers working with the focus groups. 17 countries from across Europe participated in the training in 2006 - the aim is to have all 47 countries in Europe participate! For more information, please contact the EYCA Office.

Research Results
We found out what young people think about youth information (2004), youth participation (2005) and perceptions of human diversity among young people (2006) as well as intercultural dialogue (2007). To read the reports, please follow the links below.

The EYCAdemy project is supported by the Partial Agreement on the Youth Card within the Council of Europe (2005-07) and the European Commission (2005-06).

Related Links

http://www.eyca.org/opencms/opencms/data_eyca_org/data/public/header/projects/related_articles/eycademy

Related Files

EYCAdemy_brochure2006-07.pdf