This past summer, I had the incredible opportunity to work with Grassroots Research and Advocacy Movement (GRAAM) on policy research. Under the mentorship of Mr. Bhagavan and Mr. Vijai, I studied the impacts of the Youth for Governance (Y4G) Fellowship that had been conducted by GRAAM in partnership with Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA).
2022 was the first year the fellowship was conducted so my research was based on the pilot cohort. The purpose of the Y4G fellowship was to bring young minds together from different disciplines to increase youth governance and civic engagement.
The first part of my project was looking at the literature regarding youth governance in India and other parts of the world. I also looked into how civic engagement was measured in other studies and found that models were created to fit the context. After cross-referencing existing civic engagement models, I created my own that catered to the Y4G context.
Then the model was used to create interview questions as well as questionnaire items. Two sets of interview questions were created: one for the fellows who had participated in the Y4G Fellowship and another set for the university coordinators who connected students to the program. The interview questions were semi-structured while the questionnaire items followed a 7-point Likert scale. A total of nine fellows and two coordinators were interviewed. Out of the 21 fellows in the pilot cohort, 18 completed the questionnaire.
To analyze the questionnaire data, I used the software JASP to gather descriptive statistics to measure the overall civic engagement of fellows and their scores for each dimension: Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice, and Leadership. For the interviews, transcriptions were done, and then ATLAS.ti was used to conduct an initial thematic analysis before I went in to manually identify repetitive codes and reference similarities to the civic engagement model created. Both qualitative and quantitive data indicated that there was a positive impact on civic engagement that was attributable to the Y4G Fellowship. The final part of my project was creating an analysis report on the qualitative and quantitative data for the GRAAM team to reference.
In addition to my project, I thoroughly enjoyed the lectures on gender and culture in India as well as developing meaningful relationships with the SVYM community. I am beyond grateful for the experience I had in India and the people I was able to meet. I would like to extend my gratitude to SVYM, the India GSL leadership team, and my cohort for making this an unforgettable experience.
