What is your role within ARK? 

I have been Director of Young Life and Times (YLT) since 2003. YLT is our annual survey of 16 year olds. The role involves overseeing and working on all aspects of the YLT survey from attracting funding, designing questions, testing and piloting with young people, making sure data collection goes well, to working on different outputs for different audiences. This could be reports for funders, ARK Research Updates, conference presentations, results summaries and academic articles or even sometimes books or book chapters. Sometimes I am also involved in follow-up interviews or focus groups with young people.

What do you most enjoy about your role in ARK?

I am happy to have found a role where I can combine my longstanding passion for improving young people’s lives with my interest in undertaking research. The YLT Director role with ARK gives me that opportunity to combine advocacy for young people with my research interests. The YLT data we collect every year is widely used by government and the third sector to inform policy making for young people, and I feel ARK is playing an important role in this. Of course, none of this could happen without the great ARK survey team who are a joy to work with.

As Professor of Youth and Social Policy, what is the focus of your research?

In a nutshell, my general work emphasis is really on trying to understand and to improve children’s and young people’s lives. My work therefore focuses on all aspects of children’s and young people’s lives. Apart from ARK, I am also involved in the well-known Centre of Children’s Rights at Queen’s University Belfast, and I am known for my expertise in participatory and collaborative research methods with children and young people. The areas of children’s and young people’s lives where I have most experience in are their education, community relations, their mental health, sport and physical activity, their rights, and the positive contributions young people make to society, for example through volunteering. I am also well-known for my research expertise and advocacy track record in the field of sexual health of young people and I have been involved in the policy development around coercive control and preventing violence against women and girls.

Find out more about Professor Schubotz’s work: https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/persons/dirk-schubotz.