Background

Youth commonly refers to the transitory period between childhood and adulthood. Definitions of the specific age range may vary and we shall leave ours open to interpretation depending on the specific nature of our focus studies. The word youth is also closely associated with culture, fashion, trends, early adoption of new technologies, education, social change, etc. which all have represented and continue to represent areas of interest for researchers. Young people are the foundation of tomorrow’s society and the drivers for its change but the way they communicate, interact, consume, learn and express themselves changes rapidly and tremendously, posing a great challenge for researchers. The generation gaps increase and provide a quickly changing landscape where young people are increasingly disengaged by anything that does not have direct relevance to them. This puts the concept of engagement at the heart of youth research.

Youth engagement was at the centre of Mr Lee Hsien Loong’s maiden national day rally speech in 2004, establishing this theme as a national development priority during his term. It is indeed increasingly challenging for educators, policy makers or marketers to engage this segment of the population and our research focus shall be to elicit concrete answers for them. In order to do that, it appears important to us to study engagement of our youth through every aspect of their environment.

Areas of Research

·   Youth Engagement and Technology: Understanding how the youth interact with technology and using technology to measure youth engagement more effectively. We will be leveraging on expertise gained from the Market Research Lab initiatives in the area of physiological metrics in consumer research and benefit from existing collaborations with industry partners.

·   Youth Consumer Behaviour: Understanding the specific attitudes and behaviour of young consumers and how companies can engage them more efficiently through their marketing initiatives. The objective will be to become a resource centre for companies (particularly Start-ups and Small and Medium Enterprises) targeting this segment.

·   Youth Entrepreneurship and Business Education: Understanding how to engage youth more effectively through innovative educational programmes and methodologies. This area could be co-developed with Centre for Educational Development (CED), generating cross departmental TDC projects.

 Past and Current Projects

·   “Effectiveness of an Entrepreneurship Education Program (Real Life Platform) for Youths: A Singapore Study”

·   “Parental background influences on entrepreneurial intentions among youths: A Singapore study” that was presented at ERAS (Educational Research Association of Singapore) conference in November 2009.

·    “Eye tracker metrics modeling”

·    “Personality Profiles, Motivators and Behaviours among Youth Entrepreneurs in Singapore”