How to effectively engage children and young people as participants is an important consideration for many longitudinal studies – whether household panel studies seeking to collect views and data from the entire household, or cohort studies specifically focused on a single child or young person.

This presentation will discuss some key considerations related to enabling and engaging children and young people to take part, with a specific focus on children who have special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). We will draw on learnings from the SEND Futures Longitudinal Study – a large-scale nationally representative feasibility study of young people with SEND in England and their parents.

Allowing children to have a parent present and/or receive support from a parent or carer during the interview may help make the interview more accessible. We will discuss protocols adopted for interviewers to facilitate this support and set out some of the challenges, including for validity of responses.

Questionnaire design and administration are also key components in enabling children with SEND to participate. We will discuss question wording, the inclusion of sensitive questions, development of visual aids to assist comprehension, and findings from a random control trial testing the effect of different survey lengths upon response rates.

We will also discuss the potential impact of survey mode on enabling and engaging young people with SEND to participate and share how this may vary by type of need.

In conclusion, we will reflect on best practice and key points of consideration, including how the learnings from our study focused on children and young people with SEND may be of relevance to longitudinal and household panel studies more widely.

Co-authors

Line Knudsen; Samantha Spencer, NatCen;

Wendy van Rijswijk; Joas Flynn; Laura Hewitson, Department of Education