Our latest £1.5 million investment for new research into the drivers of violence and what works to prevent it  

At YEF we are committed to building the best and most reliable evidence on what works to prevent children and young people becoming involved in violence. We do this by funding high quality, cutting edge, research. We are pleased to announce that, as a result of our latest call for secondary data analysis (SDA) projects, we’ll be investing £1.5 million into 10 new studies. They will generate evidence across a range of priority areas, including mental health support, children’s services, policing, youth clubs and many other topics.  

But what exactly is secondary data analysis?  

Essentially “secondary data” is data that already exists before the research begins. There are lots of different types of secondary data, for example: 

• Administrative data is collected when people interact with public services (e.g. doctors’ or hospital records, data collected by schools on children’s attendance and progress, police or court records on those involved in crime). These datasets can cover many millions of records and capture nearly everyone using these services.  
• Cohort studies (e.g. the Millenium Cohort Study), which follow the same group of people over time and allow us to observe how various social, health or other outcomes interact over people’s lives.  
• ‘Natural data’ which people generate themselves, for example, through their activities on social media. 

Using secondary data can not only be a lot quicker, but it can also help answer questions that other forms of research find hard. These studies allow us to draw on large numbers of observations (often millions), which increases the precision and confidence in our findings. They can enable us to track how things have changed over many years. And, they mean we can evaluate the impact of large scale policy and practice changes that affect whole systems or areas of society. 

What type of questions can secondary data analysis answer?  

There are broadly three types of questions that secondary data analysis can answer.  

1. Descriptive analysis: what does an issue or population look like? How does this change over time or for different populations? For example, little is known currently about which children and young people are diverted from the criminal justice system, how many and what are their previous patterns of offending. 

2. Analytical approaches that seek to test associations between different variables. For example, what are the associations between different types of risk factors (poverty, drug abuse, care experience, etc) and violence outcomes, and how predictive are these?  

3. Methods that that seek to establish the causal effect of policies or interventions on outcomes – sometimes known as quasi-experimental design (or QED). These include a range of techniques that attempt to mimic randomization. They artificially identify a “treatment group” – a group of people who have experienced a particular service, intervention or policy, compared to a very similar (hopefully otherwise identical!) “control”, who have not.  

Across all our SDA projects, we always seek to determine whether the results are the same or different for children from different ethnic backgrounds. We know that Black children and young people are significantly overrepresented at all stages in the youth justice system. In the year ending March 2023, for example, Black children accounted for 14% of all arrests involving children, despite making up approximately 4% of the 10-17 year old population in England and Wales. Furthermore, they comprised 29% of those in youth custody, compared to 47% who were White, 6% who were Asian, and 17% from other ethnic groups. If we don’t understand the specific experiences of children from Black, Asian and other minority backgrounds, we won’t be able to make the difference we’re here to bring about. 

What SDA projects have we funded so far?  

To date, YEF have funded a total of eight SDA projects. Our first report was published in January. This research explored the relationships between adverse and positive early childhood experiences and violence. In the coming months we look forward to publishing the results from three more studies. Two of these are generating new insights into the relationships between school suspensions, exclusions and absences and alternative education provision and violence and crime. The third study explores the use of alternatives to formal justice processing (e.g. diversion) for children who commit crimes in London.  

What are the new projects we’re funding?  

The table below summarises the research questions we’re addressing across the 10 new projects we’re funding*. Below, we’ve pulled out an example of one of these projects. 

*This list is subject to contracts being signed.