Statistics and Stories: Generating Evidence of Youth Work Effectiveness

This paper describes an action research project, which sought tosupport Scottish Community Learning and Development (CL&D) workers (particularly grass roots workers) to generate evidenceof theefectivenessof theirinterventions and to build confidence across the field in doing so. Whilst the project focused on CL&D workers in general, we seek here to focus on the experienceof youth workers. Focus group swere held with 66 people from throughout Scotland to seek opinions on current and good practice in generating evidence. We identified a need for further continuing professional development (CPD) on statistics and stories,our phrase used to embrace quantitative and qualitative methodologies.