Young Lives
A ground-breaking international study of childhood poverty following the lives of 12,000 children in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam over 15 years. Young Lives aims to shed light on the drivers and impacts of child poverty and generate evidence to help policymakers design programmes that make a real difference to poor children and their families.
We have worked closely to present research output in a clear and easily accessible way
University research site
Research sites present targeted information to policy makers and researchers
When we arrived on the project in 2015, Young Lives were coming to the end of the data collection period. They had an incredible mass of data which included working papers, policy papers, articles, reports and case studies. The data would provide an incredible source of insight to a wide range of audiences including academic researchers, post-graduate students, social development advisers and policy advisers both in the UK and around the world. It was our job to ensure that the data was accessible, but more importantly, that the right people could find the right information and fast.
So, where did we start? We decided to gather representatives from the team to help to clarify the audiences and to allow us to delve deeper into understanding what each audience was looking to achieve on the website.
Following this exercise, we identified two different audiences with differing navigational needs:
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The policy community looking for evidence to guide policy.
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The research community looking to get quick access to research and data.
The challenge for us in serving the policy audience was to present a wealth of research in a way that made it easy for them to navigate. We solved this by using the global Sustainable Development goals as a content framework and created a visual journey to navigate to the summative reports and clear signposting to a range of fact sheets, infographics and data visualisations. For those looking for more detail, we developed a sophisticated publications search that enables a user to quickly and easily search through more than 400 publications by author, country, theme and keyword.
To satisfy the needs of the research audience, we developed a quick path straight to the data itself.
Once we’d completed the main website, we worked with Young Lives to develop dedicated sites for the individual country-based research teams.
Since the initial study was completed, the Young Lives team has been conducting further research to deepen the understanding of young people's everyday experiences. This programme is providing such rich and important findings that it was recently awarded a significant new grant by the Department of International Development. As the programme now moves into its next phase, we are actively discussing with Young Lives how to evolve the website to continue to meet the needs of their audiences.
Check out the Young Lives website here
If we could help you present your research in a clear and easily accessible way, please get in touch. Can we help you too?
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