Secondary Data Analysis Projects to learn about Violence Prevention (UK)

This year they plan to focus the funding on studies that have a strong causal design; that is, projects that employ strategies that allow them to infer the causal impacts of policies, practices and interventions for, and drivers of, children and young people’s involvement in crime and violence.

SDA can help to address research questions where randomised controlled trials and other research designs are infeasible, unethical, or inefficient. They broadly think of SDA as covering three different types of analysis:

• Impact studies – This includes quasi-experimental designs that allow causal inference on the effects of drivers, policies, practices and interventions on crime and violence outcomes.
• Relationship testing – This includes regressions (e.g. panel designs/multi-level models) that test for the existence of relationships to crime and violence outcomes, although stops short of being able to make casual
• Descriptive analysis – This includes descriptions of population or issues that are not well understood or exploration of research questions related to crime and violence, for which there is very little evidence.

The YEF is funded to support children in England and Wales, and they will only fund research using datasets that cover these countries. Projects may include data covering populations at the national or sub-national level (e.g., cities, local authorities, police force areas etc.).

Focus Areas

• This year they’re looking to fund projects with two main focuses:
  • The impact of policies, practices and interventions: Studies with a rigorous design that will allow causal inference on the effects of policies, practices and interventions on children and young people’s involvement in crime and violence.
  • Drivers and broader context: Studies that explore the drivers and broader context of children and young people’s involvement in crime and violence. For these questions, whilst they remain interested in funding impact studies, they’re also interested in funding research that is more descriptive or exploratory in nature.

Research Questions

• The specific research questions they’d like proposals to address, are:
  • Impact of policies, practices and interventions
    • What impact do youth clubs have on children’s involvement in crime and violence?  Are there varying impacts by different types of settings and for different groups of children and young people?
    • What are the impacts of hot spots policing and stop and search on children and young people’s involvement in crime and violence, and, specifically for stop and search, its impact on mental health?
    • What are the impacts of media campaigns (including knife surrender schemes) on children and young people’s involvement in crime and violence?
    • What are the impacts of being identified as being at risk of child criminal exploitation (CCE) on children and young people’s involvement in crime and violence?
    • What is the impact of placing youth workers or ‘navigators’ in police custody so they can support children when they are arrested?
  • Drivers and broader context
    • What is the age-crime curve for the current population in England and Wales? How does it vary by type, frequency and severity of offending, and background characteristics of those involved? What are the factors that explain when it peaks and for whom?
    • Where and when are children and young people most likely to be victims of violent crime, such as knife assault, and how does this relate to the timing of the school day and other locations young people congregate (e.g. youth clubs)? Where is violence perpetrated by children and young people most geographically concentrated, and what predicts where it happens?
    • To what extent are certain children more or less likely to be involved in specific types of offending?
    • What drives the disproportionality in offending outcomes, by granular ethnicity, with a particular focus on children and young people from Black Caribbean, Roma and Gypsy or Irish Traveller backgrounds?
    • What role do drug markets play in explaining children and young people’s involvement in crime and violence?
    • What role do real-world social networks play in explaining how and why children and young people become involved in crime and violence?
    • Which indicators (or combinations thereof) from locally held or other administrative data are the best predictors of children and young people’s involvement in crime and violence?

Funding Information

• They anticipate projects will last between 18 and 24 months to complete. They do not set an upper ceiling on the amount they fund per project. Previous projects have been awarded between £100,000-£180,000. Applicants will need to make the case for the budget and timelines they submit. All applications will need to include a completed budget template.

Required Outputs 

• All successful teams will be expected to complete three core outputs over the course of the project and have them signed-off by the YEF before progressing to the next phase. These outputs are:
  • Analysis plan and data access approval: This initial phase will involve the completion of a detailed analysis plan, expanding on the methodology set out in the application. They also expect to see evidence that all aspects of data sharing and access have been fully approved by relevant data owners. The analysis plan will be published on the YEF website.
  • Interim research report: This will include an initial descriptive analysis of the dataset(s) and evidence of initial testing; or exploration of the feasibility of the research design, underlying assumptions and/or alternative approaches. Interim reports are typically not published, these are internal documents for YEF to review progress against the agreed research questions.
  • Final research report: This will include a full write-up of the results of the analysis addressing each of the research questions. These will be published on the YEF website.

For more information, visit YEF.