Research Proposal

“Motives of county council members that are driving

institutionalisation of youth participation”
Hans Peter Lührs
Email: Peter_Luehrs@gmx.de

I. Introduction
In March 2015 about 500 young people of the ninth to 11th grade coming from various schools as
well as youth leagues in the County of Friesland in Germany, Lower Saxony gathered in so-called
“demography workshops” to develop their own ideas of how to face demographic change and to
participate in shaping how their county would deal with this hot topic. This project was so successful
from the view of the young people as well as the political administration of Friesland, that it was clear
to everyone that this shortened remain a singular project but that young people should stay involved.
For that purpose an institutional structure should be provided to ensure this. So, in January 2016 it
was decided that forming a Youth Parliament for Friesland will be aimed at. In a highly symbolic act
in October the same year the county council of Friesland voted in favour of the constitution which
had been developed for the use Parliament by the young people themselves. While at first the use
Parliament was going to have a budget of €5000, the county council decided on February 15 th, 2017
to raise this budget up to the staggering amount of €50,000.
Clearly this is a success story. The question is, how this success story was made. The motives and
intentions that drove the various actors in this case are everything but clear: What made the county
council decide so positively in regard to the budget which will be at disposal to the Youth Parliament?
Was it the good work of the young people? Or did other motives enter this? These are interesting
questions, which are rarely looked into in the field of social work and social pedagogy in Germany.
The main interest lies with the young people and perhaps their parents and social works professionals
when looking at what makes projects such as the one introduced above successful, as can be seen for
example in the study “Kinder ohne Einfluss?” (Schneider, Stange, Roth, 2011). As part of the
initiative “mitWirkung!” of the Bertelsmann Stiftung there has been an intensive survey of the
situation of child and youth participation in Germany (Fatke, Schneider 2005), which showed the
importance of county actions in the success of such participation. Though while it shows the
importance of e.g. the county informing about opportunities for participation, the number of
opportunities for participation, how much young people are taken into account in county resolutions
or the financial resources which are provided for the participation of young people, there is not shown
which motives drive such action. The same study shows that the most important factor in regard to
the participation intensity of young people is how satisfied they are by previous experiences of
participation. This satisfaction is a result of how the expectations are matched by the experience of
the participation process and its results. This is to a large degree controlled by the actions of the
county administration as there is a power imbalance between it and the young people, who often times
don’t even have the right to vote, yet (see Betz, Gaiser, Pluto 2010, Betz 2008, BJK 2009). Given this
imbalance it is of special importance to look at why the administration either provides the above
factors or not.
The following study will try to approach this problem by exploring the motives of actors in the
administration of the County of Friesland for supporting the forming youth Parliament. A case study
about this will be able to shed light on which factors played a role in this and thus give a better
understanding about the underlying causes which prompted the county council to give this kind of
support. The reaserach will be conducted by applying the ZMET method in interviewing members of
the county council on the topic of “Young people and the county of Friesland”, hoping to elicit the
mental maps of the members to show how they think about young people in their county and how
they fit into the county from the perspective of the county council members. Exploring this will
hopefully not only give insights into the motives for the financial support of the forming Youth
Parliament of Friesland, but also provide a good foundation for further inquiry in this topic beard
through a quantitative survey or for developing models which can be tested quantitatively. Hopefully
this study will also provide help to administrator bodies and social work professionals in
understanding what can make youth participation a success. For this reason the aim is that the results
of the study will be published in are specialists magazine for social work to reach an audience that
goes beyond the purely academic circles.

II. Research Method

The proposed study will be a single case study, in which the members of the county council of
Friesland will be interviewed according to the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET)
(Zaltman and Coulter 1995). This method has been originally developed for advertising research,
aiming to elicit the metaphors, constructs and mental models that drive consumers' thinking and
behaviour (Zaltman and Coulter 1995, S. 36). It has since been used in a variety of fields ranging
from examining the motives of mountain bikers (Glenn L. Christensen and Jerry C. Olson 2002),
through video game research on player-avatar relations (Clark 2008), to research on how women
recover from substance abuse (Matheson, McCollum 20008). The method lends itself to this wide
range of research topics due to the fact that that it aims to uncover the mental models that drive
thinking and behaviour and as such can easily be adopted outside the field of advertising research and
is thus an adequate tool for research into the motives of the members of the county council of
Friesland in giving such a generous budget to the Youth Parliament of their county.
Informants will be recruited from the 42 members of the county council of Friesland with the help of
Sandra Gudehus, who's Kreisjugendpflegerin in the county of Friesland and who's heading the Project
to establish the Youth Parliament. The aim is to recruit about 10 informants for the interviews that are
at the basis of the ZMET method, who will be informed about the study and the used method and be
asked for their consent to use the conducted interviews in this way. The role of the interviewer will
be that of a neutral guide through the steps of the ZMET method.
Data will be collected as per ZMET (Zaltman and Higie 1995, pp. 40-43) in the form of pictures as
well as in a guided interview. The interviewees will be instructed about 7 days before the interview
will take place, to collect up to 10 pictures from the internet or other sources to their liking
(magazines, newspapers, etc.) that indicate best what the topic “Young people in the county of
Friesland” means to them. The interviews will be recorded and photographs of the pictures will be
taken if needed. Notes on the course of the interview will be taken by the interviewer for orientation
purposes as well as additional material for later coding.
The guided interview of the ZMET method as described by Zaltman and Higie (1995, pp. 40-43)
consists of 10 steps. But they caution that only a subset of them are used in any particular research
project, as inclusion of the steps depends on the nature of the problem and the intended use of the
data (Zaltman and Higie 1995, p. 40). The steps that are most important to elicit construct pairs are
the steps of Storytelling, Missed Issues and Images and Construct Elicitation (Zaltman and Higie
1995, p. 43). The steps that will be used in this study and the order in which they will be passed
through are as follows:
In Step 1, Storytelling, the interviewee describes the images that he brought to the interview. The
expectation is that the interviewee will have had time to think about the story they want to tell with
the given picture or have an argument prepared to explain why he picked this picture and what it is
supposed to represent about the interview topic.
In step 2, Missing Issues and Images, the interviewee will be asked if there are any important issues
regarding the topic for which the interviewee was unable to find fitting pictures and to describe how
these pictures would look like and what they would mean to them.
In step 3, Sorting, the interviewee is asked to sort the pictures into categories of similar meaning. The
interviewee is free to open as many categories as they want to and put as many or few pictures into
those categories as he wants and then will be asked to label those categories. This step aims at
identifying the main themes and constructs relevant to the interviewee.
In step 4, Construct Elicitation, the interviewer will randomly pick three pictures. The interviewee
will be asked to explain the similarities and dissimilarities between those pictures. This is a modified
version of the Kelly Repertory Grid technique (Kelly 1991) and aims at the elicitation of the
constructs that underlie thinking and action by showing which of the two pictures are similar to each
other in relation to the third (Zaltman and Higie 1995 p. 41). In addition to this the interviewee is
repeatedly pushed by repreated 'Why?'-questions to find the subconscious motives of the interviewee
when dealing with young people in Friesland. This is an application of the Laddering Technique
(Reynolds and Gutman 1988) aiming at discovering the deep personal values of the interviewee which
are at the end of means-end chains informing their actions. Using the Laddering Technique together
with the Kelly Repertory Grid technique forms an effective mechanism to have the interviewees
articulate constructs and their interrelation (Zaltman and Higie 1995, p. 41).
In step 5, Most Representative Image, the interviewee will be asked to indicate which picture is the
most representative one for the topic of “Young people in the county of Friesland”. This aims at
understanding the common theme which the interviewee has in mind in regard to the topic.
In step 6, Opposite Image, the interviewee will be asked to describe a picture that expresses the
opposite to what they feel and think in regard to the topic of “Young people in the county of
Friesland”. If the interviewee wants to look for fitting pictures a PC will be provided for that purpose.
He's then asked to explain why this image represents the opposite of his thoughts on the topic at hand.
This concludes the interview. The steps omitted from the full scheme provided by Zaltman and Higie
(1995, p. 40-44) are the following: Step 7, Sensory Images, aims at offering other than visual pictures
to further explore the concepts, metaphors and mental models – it has a similar function as picking
pictures and is omitted therefore. Step 9, The Summary image, allows the interviewee to create a
montage from the pictures he brought. This has a function similar to steps 4 and 5, giving an
opportunity to express the relations between those pictures visually. Step 10, The Vignette, allows the
participants to create a short video in which they can express themselves through moving pictures to
give them the opportunity to express themselves in a way that allows for uncovering relations that are
temporal and thus hardly expressed in still pictures. Again, this has a similar purpose as steps already
gone through and is thus omitted.
Step 8, The Mental Map, is where the Interviewer creates a mental map based on the preceding steps
of the interview and gives the interviewee the opportunity to give feedback to this map, to point out
anything that the interviewer missed or misunderstood or also to add anything important that is still
missing, but now coming to the interviewees mind.
This step will be omitted in the interview, as in this study the individual mind maps, depicting the
mental models of the interviewees will be constructed by the researcher after the interviews have been
concluded. After transcription of the interviews, this will be done with the support of the ATLAS.ti
software in which the interviews will be coded in terms of paired-construct relationships and then
used to build construct maps to represent the mental models of the interviewees. The steps of
Storytelling, Missed Issues and Images and Construct Elicitation are most important to elicit construct
pairs (Zaltman and Higie 1995, p. 43) will be preferentially taken into account for coding. Coding
will mainly be guided by the inductive identification of constructs according to grounded theory
(Bryant and Carmaz 2007), but there will be also categories which have been won deductively from
the prior theoretical work on youth participation (Lührs, in preparation). These hypothetico-deductive
categories will include the concepts of justice, the good life, recognition, and civil friendship, power,
Live-World and System amongst others, as those have been identified as core concepts for
participation of young people by considering the social philosophy of Aristotle and Habermas. This
will allow to put the results of this study into a broader context. Coding will be done by two coders
independently and discussed between the two afterwards to increase coding reliability.
In addition, the resulting individual maps of the interviewees mental models will then be sent back to
to them to allow for their feedback, to help increase the accuracy of interpretation and thus the validity
of this study. This also serves the same function as step 8, that has therefore been omitted in the
context of the interview.
From those maps of individual mental models a consensus map will be constructed (Zaltman and
Higie 1995, pp. 44-47). Two criteria are guiding in the construction of the consensus map. The number
of interviewees mentioning a given construct and the number of interviewees mentioning a
relationship between two concepts (Zaltman and Higie 1995, pp. 44). Again, the construction of the
consensus map will be done with the help of ATLAS.ti. Zaltman and Higie (1995, p. 45) give as a
rule that at least one third of the participants must mention a concept for it to be included on the
consensus map and at least one quarter of them must have mentioned a relationship between tow
concepts for it to be included. If that's the case, the consensus map captures 80 percent of the
constructs mentioned by each participant.

III. Preliminary Biases, Suppositions and Hypotheses

The relevant literature that I have reviewed to date is on the one hand the empirical research about
the participation of young people that is best represented by the two big studies financed by the
Bertelsmann foundation (Fatke and Schneider 2005) and the ZDF (Schneider, Stange, Roth 2011). As
mentioned in the introduction, these leave the role of the adults in youth participation up to some
guesswork, unless it's social work professionals. The motives of a county administration in supporting
youth participation in the public sphere remains opaque in those studies. Yet, it is clear from those
studies that the administration plays an important role in the success of youth participation and can
influence the results of participation projects through administrative and financial means. It stands to
reason that there are motives behind these actions.
On the other hand, there's an ongoing theoretical discussion on differing perspectives on participation
coming to the field of social pedagogics and social work from the reference dicipline of political
science (Schultze 2002; Moynihan 2016): Here one can find basically two camps, one that tries to
argue for a normative perspective on participation, that upholds the intrinsic value of participation –
especially for a modern democracy as a guarantee for the sovereignty of the people, while the other
argues for participation from the vantage point of it's instrumental value in allowing citizens to reach
their individual goals within the public sphere.
This theoretical discussion suggests that participation of young people and thus the relation of young
people to the county can be seen in two, not mutually exclusive frames. First, the county council
might see instrumental value in establishing a youth council – not only for the young people but also
for the county council as well. The county council might for example be seen as a way to more
effectively distribute money that’s bound to be spent by/for child and youth services. If there is a
youth council that decides on those spendings that might lead to easing the burden on deciding on
such matter for the county council and the administration. Furthermore, the county council can hand
over some of the responsibility for those spendings to the youth council as well. This might further
the goals of the county council members regarding upcoming elections in various ways.
Second, there might be other aims found with the council members in regard to supporting the
forming Youth parliament of the county of Friesland. They might value the input of the young people
and that young people are taking up their issues as well as issues that pertain to them and the adults
of the county, trying to contribute to solutions to the best of their abilities. It might also taken to be
an effective way to combat political apathy in young people – though empirical studies show that
young people are disenchanted with traditional politics, where one has to associate with a party, rather
than with politics in general (Gaiser and de Rijke 2002). The count council might thus see in the
Youth Parliament a counterbalance to issues of the demographic change (Hurrelmann 2002). All these
things might be seen as intrinsically valuabe or as instrumental in reaching some other goal, like
allowing the continued functioning of the county in confrontation with the demographic change. As
said above, intrinsic/normative and instrumental reasons for participating young people don’t have to
be mutually exclusive. The intrinsic/normative perspective points at a deeper dimension, though, that
of deeper concepts with which democratic theory does deal, like justice, freedom, autonomy and the
like (Christiano 2015).
Finally, there is a third strain of literature that I have reviewed in preparing for this study. This is the
ongoing discussion in the field of social philosophy, which deals extensively with the concepts that
arise when one has to engage with the theory of democracy and the social sphere in general. I have
mainly focused on the social philosophy of Aristotle, which is basically comprised of his
Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle/Wolf 2006) and Politics (Aristotle/Stalley/Barker 2009), and of the
mature Habermas as found in his magnum opus Theory of communicative Action (Habermas 1981)
and in the two works he dedicated to the treatment of his discourse ethics (Habermas 1983; Habermas
1991).
In the perspective of Aristotelian social philosophy participation has to be thought of in the context
of Eudaimonia, human flourishing or the good life, the top of the chain of reasons for human actions.
The solution that the Aristotelian philosophy gives is not merely one of such systemic arrangements
(e.g. the mixed constitution (Hahm 2009)), but also asks how the individual citizens are able to be to
treat each other justly and are – as political animals – able to build relationships of civic/political
friendship (Cooper 2005). Aristotle makes a strong case for the naturally social inclinations of humans
and them having common goals, one that is supported by modern anthropological studies (e.g.
Tomasello 2009). This leads me mainly to suspect that in successful participation projects, like the
one incipient with the Youth Council in Friesland, the county council will see that there are goals they
have in common with the young people and that it thus makes sense to cooperate.
This expectation is further corroborated by Habermas (1981) taxonomy of action in which strategic
action, which considers others as obstacles and means to reach ones individual ends, is contrasted
with communicative action, which is oriented at mutual understanding and thus cooperation, based
in the understanding that the goals are inherently reasonable and merit-worthy. A further expectation
derived from Habermas distinction between the Life-World of common communications and the
Systems that moderate human action through capital – in the case of the market economy – or
legitimate force – in the case of the political administration – is that in the case of Friesland the county
council members were aware of and willing to share administrative power for the sake of the common
goal of living together in their common county.
The last thing that is shaping those expectation is the researchers field experience, which suggests
that project such as the one in Friesland are successful if the ones holding the power see the situation
more in the terms of those over-arching concepts of justice, civil friendship, good life and so forth.
Thus, it is expected to find a prevalence of such concepts in the common mind map of the county
council members of Friesland in regard to young people.
 IV. References and Mini-Bibliography

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Computer Programs

ATLAS.ti: www.atlasti.com

.Atlas.ti: http://atlasti.com/nd well documented. See Atkinson, Heath, and Chenail (1991).