Foundation for Young Australians builds a national reputation for quantitative research

Instrumented: Online surveys gather qualitative and quantitative data from students, teachers and other stakeholders before and after they have participated in FYA’s programmes.

Interconnected: The data is imported into IBM SPSS Statistics, where it can be combined with external data-sets and analysed using many different dimensions.

Intelligent: The analyses enable FYA to see which areas of its programmes are most effective, and identify areas that need improvement. For example, analysis revealed that students did not feel that the Worlds of Work programme was making them more resilient to setbacks. As a result, FYA has recalibrated the programme to focus more on resilience.

The Foundation for Young Australians (FYA) is a national, independent, non-profit organisation dedicated solely to young people. FYA believes that all young people have the courage, imagination and will to shape their education and create social change. Its mission is to empower young Australians to be successful learners and creative, active and valued citizens. It achieves this through research, initiatives and partnerships and by harnessing the passion of young people to make a difference.

FYA employs 35 people, four of whom work in its research and evaluation team. Although this team is relatively small, its output is comparable to that of many larger research organisations: it is an avid producer of publications relating to the objectives and results of FYA’s programmes, authoring 15 research reports, two books, 16 monographs and 45 articles in the past three years. It has also been a partner in six Australian Research Council projects, made four submissions to parliamentary inquiries, provided more than 45 briefings to government agencies, businesses and the community sector, and spoken at 26 conferences and seminars, including 12 keynote addresses.

Building a reputation for research

“We want to continue to build our reputation as one of the top youth-related research organisations in the country,” explains Dr Naomi Berman, Manager, Policy and Evaluation at FYA. “There’s an increasing appetite for quantitative research that can look at factors such as gender and demographics and their relation to the success of youth programmes, so we were keen to put ourselves at the forefront for this kind of project. However, our existing tools were not sophisticated enough to support this level of analysis.”

At the time, FYA was gathering information using online surveys, which were completed by students, teachers and other participants in its youth programmes. Although the online survey tool was good for data collection, the tools it provided for analysing the data were not sufficiently advanced to enable the use of more advanced statistical techniques.

Dr Berman had used IBM SPSS software in some of her previous jobs in the academic and local government sectors, and the whole research and evaluation team was aware of SPSS’s credentials as a research tool.

Creating a business case for IBM SPSS software

“Reputation is an important factor in research – if you use SPSS to prepare the statistics for your research papers, your reviewers and readers will know that you’re using a reliable and well-respected tool,” says Dr Berman. “More importantly, from my prior experience of the software, I knew it could deliver exactly what we needed in terms of quantitative analysis of the outcomes of our programmes.

“We also saw an opportunity to transform our business model by using these same analytical tools to provide independent assessments of other organisations’ research. We believed that SPSS would be a powerful selling point, helping us to win new business and bring in new income for FYA.”

Based on this business case, FYA decided to go ahead with the purchase of IBM SPSS Statistics Base and IBM SPSS Custom Tables. The software was deployed quickly, and the FYA team was soon able to begin importing and analysing data collected from the online survey questionnaires.

Assessing youth programmes

“One of the biggest successes we’ve had so far with SPSS is an evaluation of our ‘Worlds of Work’ programme,” comments Dr Berman. “It’s a very successful programme that started in Melbourne and is now being rolled out nationally. And because we’re expanding it, the need to ensure that it’s producing the right outcomes is becoming even more important.”

Worlds of Work aims to help young people aged 15 and older build the skills and beliefs needed to make a successful transition into life after school. It comprises a series of workshops that take students on a journey that broadens their view on what it means to be successful in the changing world of work. Students learn from and work with employees from some of Australia’s leading workplaces, including IBM, as well as being supported by their own schools and teachers.

“We surveyed the students, teachers and mentors at the start of the programme and then again at the end,” says Dr Berman. “We then analysed the data with SPSS Statistics and used SPSS Custom Tables to summarise the results in a simple and accessible way. We discovered that the vast majority of students had genuinely advanced in most of the key areas that the programme was intended to cover. The only area where we didn’t see improvement was resilience – the ability to bounce back from setbacks – so we are now looking at ways to recalibrate the program and focus more on this important life skill.”

Looking to the long term

The enhanced analytical capabilities provided by SPSS also make it possible for FYA to perform long-term analyses more effectively, so the team has decided to start collecting data from students three to six months after they have completed the program – and even to revisit students who participated in the programme three years ago, to see how their lives have subsequently developed. With this data in place, FYA will be able to form an ever more accurate assessment of how programmes like Worlds of Work affect long-term career prospects and personal development.

“Ideally, in the medium term, we’re looking to develop a sort of CRM system that maintains a permanent record of young people who have taken part in our programmes, so we can follow up at regular intervals and see where their lives take them,” says Dr Berman. “This will really give us a rich source of data for future research projects, and should also enable us to start doing some predictive analyses – for example, forecasting which students are most likely to profit from which programmes.”

Ultimately, by giving FYA a better understanding of how to create high-impact programmes, the analytical tools should help young people throughout Australia to achieve personal success and play an active and beneficial role in the local and national community.

Revenue generation

As predicted, the investment in IBM SPSS software has also helped FYA win new business in the form of assessing other organisations’ research projects and data.

“There are a lot of organisations running youth-related projects across Australia, both locally and nationally – and there are many large-scale surveys being conducted that could potentially provide a lot of very valuable data – provided it is collected and interpreted in a reliable way,” says Dr Berman. “Our growing reputation for high-quality quantitative research has put us in a good position to help other organisations perform analyses and check their research. And with the IBM SPSS software, we have the tools to do it.”

Since implementing the IBM SPSS software, FYA has been able to win external research contracts worth ten times as much as the initial software investment. This has transformed research and evaluation from a cost centre into a revenue generator – and has provided enough extra budget to expand the team.

“The extra income has enabled us to hire a new analyst and to participate in conferences and events that we would never previously have been able to afford,” says Dr Berman. “This is invaluable in terms of professional development, because by mixing with other researchers we’ve learned a huge amount that will help us increase the quality of our output even further in the future.”

One stand-out moment for FYA was during the analysis of a major external project, where the SPSS analysis proved that one of the main research tools that had been developed was not reliable.

“The result was bad news, because it cast doubt on the validity of some of the conclusions of the project – and of course, that’s never what the client wants to hear!” says Dr Berman. “But research is only valuable if it’s done rigorously, and SPSS gives us a very powerful way of detecting unsound methods and conclusions. Research papers that will potentially affect national policy-making – and by extension, the lives of thousands of young people across the country – need to be based on results, not rhetoric.”

She concludes: “Looking at all the ways we are using the IBM SPSS software to improve both our internal programmes and the external evaluations, it’s clear that the investment has been more than worthwhile both operationally and financially. SPSS has single-handedly made the biggest difference to our sustainability as a research unit within a small non-government organisation.”

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