The COORDINATE Working Package 8, consisting of members of University of Bologna and Manchester Metropolitan University, aims at fostering the creation of a broad pan-European network involving scientific communities, policy-makers and other possible stakeholders.
Our first step in building and integrating this network was to perform a country-specific mapping of infrastructures, key scientists, data users and investments on survey research. We focused on those pertinent to longitudinal studies and/or children and young person’s wellbeing. Our mapping covered 30 countries, both inside and outside the Consortium, as listed in the following table.
The target population of our mapping exercise includes all the GUIDE’s potential community of data users. We have mapped 2.576 contacts, dividedaccording to the categories showed in the following pie chart:
In addition to our mapping effort, we have we have organised several events to increase the cooperation between the members of the COORDINATE consortium and the relevant scientific communities. We organized two events (November ’21 and January ’22)dedicated to policymakers and researchers. Next, we organized two webinars to develop the GUIDE Partner Forum: the first one (April 2022) introduced new GUIDE partners to the projects and updated existing partners on recent developments. The second one (May 2022) focused on the topic of securing funding for GUIDE.
The participation to the events and the mapping data we collected were uneven across European countries (the graph excludes countries with no attendees). This was not unexpected: expertise and interest in longitudinal surveys pertinent to child and youth well-being are not distributed equally across Europe. Conscious of this,a furtheraim of our mapping exercise is to identify those gaps and develop capacity building strategies for promoting the use of GUIDE data.We have started working on this issue through a quantitative approach:we used mapping data to compare the average number of contacts across countries. We used the difference between the average value and the national values as an indicator of capacity-building need.Thismethodology has many limitations, but it gives a quick insight into the mapping results and the national capacity building needs; providing useful insights for several other WPs.
Given these first results, we are excited tokeep working to broaden and consolidate our scientific and policy network! We will keep you updated!