Young Lives at Work, Young Lives’ principal research project, will continue to follow into youth and young adulthood, the original study cohorts of children in Ethiopia, India (Andhra Pradesh and Telangana States), Peru and Vietnam, surveyed for the first time in 2002.
The YLAW team will conduct a 6th Round of our household (quantitative) survey followed by a 7th Round in 2024 (subject to additional funding). The team will revisit the 12,000 children, now young people of 19 years old (Younger Cohort) and 25 years old (Older Cohort).
YLAW involves research into the factors that promote and/or constrain equality of opportunity and social mobility among young people in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), focusing on decent work and entrepreneurship as the key outcomes. Young Lives’ extensive life-history information allows us to explore pathways to outcomes in early adulthood and analyse the role of an extraordinarily rich set of individual, caregiver, household, education institution and community characteristics, including in some settings policies and programmes that have been implemented.
The team's plans for Round 6 in 2020 were well under way when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. In response to the crisis, they established the revised research programme ‘Listening to Young Lives at Work: COVID-19 phone survey 2020’ and postponed the in-person Round 6 survey fieldwork by one calendar year to 2021. For more details, please see our featured story on this page, read the blog on the Young Lives response to COVID and click on “Phone Survey” tab.
‘Studying the life trajectories of the Young Lives ‘children’ offers a unique opportunity to discover who is most likely to recover from a childhood in poverty, at what age, in which circumstances and with what implications for participation in the labour market and entrepreneurship’
YLAW co Principle Investigator, Marta Favara.