Helping young people affected by homelessness with Depaul
by Beth Woods, Evaluation Manager, Depaul UK
"The project demonstrated the potential of the data we had collected when you apply the right approaches and ask the right questions."
Beth Woods
Evaluation Manager, Depaul UK
In everything that we do at Depaul UK, we aim to make a positive difference to the young people we support. Every person we help is in a unique situation and has a unique set of needs, so we focus on the individual and offer tailored support.
We offer accommodation for those facing homelessness; provide support and mediation when relationships break down; and work alongside young people to help them live independently, manage mental health problems, build healthy relationships, and access education, employment and training.
In 2019, we developed the Youth Homelessness Outcomes Tracker (YHOT), an innovative tool for tracking and measuring outcomes in real-time for all of the young people we work with. The tracker includes questions on all areas of young people’s lives, including emotional wellbeing, relationships, financial stability, accommodation and learning and development. It provides a holistic assessment of how young people feel about where they’re at, informing the plans made with their support worker, as well as collecting data on the experiences of young people while accessing our support services.
After piloting the YHOT across our services between 2020 and 2021, we had collected over 800 completed questionnaires — a wealth of data that we knew contained rich insights into the experiences of the young people we support. By putting the tool into action, we also found there was potential room for improvement in aspects of the YHOT. Making sense of where to go from here felt like an important, but overwhelming, task.
We were lucky enough to have already worked with DataKind UK on another project in 2017, so we knew they were the right people to go to. Over a weekend in August 2021, DataKind UK brought together around 30 data science volunteers to ‘dive’ into our YHOT data, working together (and at incredible pace) to help us understand what we could learn from it. It was real a privilege to work with such skilled and talented people, and I’m so grateful for the time they dedicated to helping us.
The DataDive weekend not only generated useful insights, but also opened new avenues for further exploration, while confirming some of our assumptions, and challenging others. It demonstrated the potential of the data we had collected when you apply the right approaches and ask the right questions. We brought our YHOT data together with our demographic data to understand how young people’s needs differ across different groups. We compared YHOT scores over time to explore what ‘progress’ looks like across different types of services, where we’re making a difference, and where could improve.
For example, this plot presents the average scores across all young people when they first complete the YHOT questionnaire.
It shows that, overall, the young people we support tend to score lower in terms of financial stability, so might benefit most from support in this area when first accessing our services.
However, we found that these averages varied, particularly when analysed by region or ethnicity, a finding that invites more exploration into these differences in future.
In our wealth of data, a clearer picture was forming about the experiences of the young people we support, generating learning for shaping services to increase their positive impact for young people at risk of homelessness.
What stood out to me was how DataKind UK’s volunteers really got to know our organisation so we could make the most of the DataDive project. We went into the weekend knowing that in future we’d like to explore the potential of creating an interactive dashboard of YHOT results — one that would help with showing the results of the tool in real-time, visualising key trends and patterns. For example, we could examine which areas women have improved in, or young people within a certain age group, or young people in a particular type of service.
The Depaul team working together online over the DataDive weekend
We came out of the project with two different examples of dashboards built from scratch during the DataDive weekend, one using Python and one using Tableau, demonstrating what it’s possible to do with our data, as well as a detailed analysis of which software might work best for us. We’ve since shared this with our web developers, and it was invaluable in helping us to clearly articulate the technical aspects of what we’d like to create.
Our work with DataKind UK also went one step further, exploring how the YHOT tool itself could be improved. We already knew that we wanted to shorten the questionnaire, and so statistical exploration of the range and diversity of answers to the different questions on the YHOT, as well as how questions relate to one another, helped us approach tricky decisions about which questions to remove, crucially, without limiting the insightfulness of the tool.
I really value how this expert advice complemented and enhanced our experience of using the YHOT in practice, supporting us to make more informed decisions about any changes we make to the tool. Since the DataDive project we have redrafted the YHOT, shortening the questionnaire and rephrasing questions we didn’t feel were working in practice, informed by a consultation with staff and young people. We feel confident that we have the best, most effective version of the YHOT going forwards.
At Depaul, we believe that the YHOT represents an important step-change in the measurement of outcomes in the youth homelessness sector. We knew that the tool held masses of potential for understanding the needs of young people at risk of homelessness, the outcomes they experience when accessing services, and the effectiveness of the support they received.
Working with DataKind UK supported us to fully realise this potential, and no doubt we’ll be calling on them as the tool develops further. We’re proud to be an increasingly data-driven organisation, and we’re excited to continue to invest in the YHOT so that other organisations, and the young people they support, can benefit from using it too.
