EuroCohort meeting in Barcelona – a boost of energy for the coming months

A week ago, from 23. to 24. of October, the EuroCohort team met in Barcelona where the Catalan Youth Agency hosted the 4^th project meeting.

The first day started with the opening presentation by the project coordinator Prof Gary Pollock reviewing the progress of the project so far to give a common basis of discussion for all the researchers attending the meeting. The day continued with the presentation of the business case of EuroCohort by teams of Manchester Metropolitan University and University of Bologna. Later, Chris Fox from Manchester and Alex Sakellariou from Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences led the discussion on the policy network mapping, where all the teams had the opportunity to shortly describe their progress in this area.

To start the second day of the meeting Terhi-Anna Wilska and Nina Heräjärvi (University of Jyväskylä) summarized their findings on the governance structures of different surveys. After that, Magda Nico from University Institute of Lisbon led the discussion on current issues in ethics and privacy. The day continued with the same subject as colleagues from UK and Croatia presented their experiences of engaging with children and youth to discuss ethics and privacy issues. The afternoon of the second day was dedicated to survey design and requirements of EuroCohort pilot survey. To close the meeting teams of Tallinn and Daugavpils Universities gave an overview of dissemination activities and a discussion was held on the idea of the planned EuroCohort animation.

The consortium was left invigorated by the warmth of Barcelona and motivated to carry on more intensively on the work to make EuroCohort happen. A special thank-you of the project team is dedicated to the Catalan Youth Agency for the smooth organization of the meeting. The next time the researchers will gather is in February in Athens.