Research
Published -
February 1, 2021 The Youth Endowment Fund’s Programme Evidence and Gap Map is the largest map of studies on this topic in the world, including more than 2,000 evaluations and systematic reviews.
Summary
We commissioned a Programmes Evidence and Gap Map to find out what evidence already exists to prevent children from becoming involved in violence. It maps over 2,000 studies, making it the largest map of its kind in the world focused on preventing youth violence.
Our Programmes Evidence and Gap Map gives you a visual representation of the quantity and quality of evidence for different interventions. It provides an easy way to search for and find relevant studies from across the world.
The Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) is a charity with a £200m endowment and a mission that matters. We’re here to prevent children and young people becoming involved in violence. We do this by finding out what works and building a movement to put this knowledge into practice.
Research on programmes to prevent youth violence
To deliver this mission, it is critical that we first map what research is already out there on what works best to prevent children from becoming involved in violence. We have now produced this map. We call it our Programmes Evidence and Gap Map.
Our Programmes Evidence and Gap Map is an interactive online tool that provides an overview of what research has been done on preventing children from becoming involved in violence.
It shows that the evidence is extensive in some areas (for example, on mental health interventions), but very limited in others (like contextual safeguarding). It helps us understand where more research is needed.
Our Programmes Evidence and Gap Map will be most useful as a reference database for academic and policy experts working in this area. But it provides the foundation for our Toolkit. The YEF Toolkit translates the underlying evidence into easy to find, easy to understand summaries, so that people working with children at risk, and those who commission services for them, can use it in their decision making.
It will also help to focus our future grant-making by identifying promising approaches that would benefit from more research and areas where there are big gaps in knowledge. It’ll make sure we’re funding the right high-quality evaluations to help us find the very best ways to reduce violence.
To develop our Programmes Evidence and Gap Map, we’ve worked closely with the Campbell Collaboration, an international social science research network that pulls together research evidence about different policy areas, produces plain language summaries and policy briefings.