Sally Palmer, Senior Lecturer and developmental psychologist in the School of Education, and Maria Clarke, Dorset Local Nature Partnership (DLNP) Manager, share experiences from their recent Engaged and Participatory Research funded project, investigating the driving factors in young people’s engagement with environmental issues.
Amount of award: £5745
This collaboration sought to understand when and why young people (aged 15-25) across Dorset engaged with environment and environmental issues in their local area. The project drew together our team’s expertise in developmental psychology, environmental education, and youth and community engagement. Primarily, the project aimed to collect pilot data to shed light on why young people become disconnected from the environment and environmental issues. We also hoped that this successful research partnership could strengthen future research bids.
The project initially involved gathering opinions from young people who had engaged with the DLNP through the DLNP’s “Young Journalist” and “Young Content Creator” workshops.
There was a change of plan mid-way through the project; instead of running workshop-style focus-groups with approx. 12 young people, opinions were gathered through two separate mixed-method surveys. The first of these was completed by eleven Young Journalists and Content Creators, and the second included responses from thirty-six 16–25-year-olds from across Dorset (including Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole).
The surveys provided a deeper insight as to the successes of the youth workshops run by the DLNP and provided our research team with more evidence as to the challenges facing young people from varied backgrounds across the region.
These findings will be shared across varied audiences, including with young people, educational practitioners, academic audiences, local communities and DLNP forum members. We are looking to share project outcomes at the Dorset COP in November 2026, and findingswill also inform a larger research bid. We hope this is the start of a co-created effort to bring together academics, practitioners, and young people as experts of their own experiences.
However, the project was not without challenges! Despite Maria having built excellent relationships with an existing group of 14–25-year-olds through their Young Journalist and Young Content Creator programmes, engaging young people was not easy initially. Workshops were not well attended; finding a time that worked for a large group of young people was tough, and there seemed to be some nervousness and perhaps lacking confidence around verbally sharing ideas with us via face-to-face video link. This experience neatly exemplified the wider challenge facing researchers and organisations who want to increase engagement with young people. To overcome this, the format for the project was adapted. When short, mostly open-ended, surveys were circulated, there was wider engagement and we heard some incredibly articulate and thoughtful insights into the challenges facing young people. These difficulties around reaching our target audience informed some of the areas focussed on in the surveys. For example, we addedquestions about preferences for communication, trustworthy sources, and how comfortable younger people feel about interacting with “older” people on environmental issues.
The experience of partnering together has been hugely positive and has cemented our interest in continued collaborative work.Maria is developing further plans to engage with young people via the DLNP, including expanding on the Young Content Creators programme as well as developing a youth advisory group. This project’s insights will be used in supporting future funding bids to reach more young people and add to the evidence of need. Some of the young people who completed the survey have already indicated an interest in being part of the planning process for the advisory group’s development and are keen to influence environmental discussions in the county.
Maria Clarke said: “This project has developed a stronger partnership with Sally, giving us huge insights into the views of more young people in Dorset. The results will really help us plan more work in the future to help young people share Dorset’s future environment. I look forward to continuing our partnership.”
Sally Palmer said: “Collaborating on this project has been an excellent experience of how we can work together to increase engagement with young people. I’m excited to develop future projects with Maria and the DLNP in the hope we can reach even more young people – particularly those who are less engaged with the environment and environmental issues or are from disadvantaged backgrounds.”