Quality, Research, & Innovation

Brisbane Youth Service has a strong commitment to evidence-informed practice and collaborative research and evaluation to drive innovation.

Research and Evaluation at BYS

Our research and evaluation centres the voices and experiences of young people and their children.

We actively collaborate and consult with young people, academics, sector partners, and community  to address gaps in knowledge and identify emerging support needs and challenges impacting the wellbeing of young people. We are committed to using evidence to continually improve the effectiveness of our work with young people.

Key Topics

7 Year Data Project
Domestic & Family Violence
Families
Homelessness
Mental Health
Youth Participation

  • Search Our Research

  • Filter By Research Topic

November 1, 2017

Creating Digital Pathways Out of Homelessness

Improving young people’s engagement with, and pathways through, the homelessness service systems is a priority for the Queensland youth and homelessness sectors. With the ever-increasing migration of contemporary culture into the digital space, there is a growing need to better understand the potential role that online technologies such as interactive apps and websites can play in both enhancing young people’s engagement with support and promoting better wellbeing outcomes for highly vulnerable homeless young people.
November 1, 2017

The Ethical Dimension of Fundraising in the Homelessness Sector

There is ongoing debate regarding the appropriate representation of recipients in charity campaign materials that are intended to accurately define and represent social problems while also maximising fundraising success. Discomfort at the use of potentially exploitive images and narratives lay at the heart of this debate.
November 1, 2017

Creating Community: Developing a Group Work Model for Young Women with an Experience of Homelessness

In response to a lack of safe spaces for young women to both connect and access supports, Brisbane Youth Service Centre for Young Women has developed a unique group program open to women aged 12 to 25 years who have had an experience of homelessness. With the goal of creating a ‘community of intent’ this model draws from perspectives, frameworks and approaches such as community cultural development, intersectionality and trauma-informed practice.
November 1, 2017

Using Art Therapy as a Tool for Relationship Management in Supported Residential Settings for Homeless Young People

A large proportion of the work in a residential supported accommodation program, is working with young people to get them ready to live independently. The young people have spent varying amounts of time in different stages of homelessness and many have a history of trauma, abuse, neglect, mental health issues, substance use, etc. We have been applying art therapy methods at various stages of our young people’s stays with us to build and enhance relationships – between the young people living in the house as well as between our young people and our youth workers.
November 1, 2017

Intimate Partner Violence and Homelessness: Young Women Lost in the Intersectionality

The commonly used term ‘domestic violence’ defines intimate partner violence by its occurrence within a ‘home’ context, rather than situating it within interpersonal relationships, whereas the term ‘Intimate Partner Violence’ (IPV) is arguably more inclusive of violent experiences that occur outside of the domestic space.
November 1, 2017

The Benefits of Good Governance

The purpose of this article is to show a clear link between effective governance and strategic business focus with strong promotion of the core values of the organisation and its service delivery approach. If an effective balance can be created, implemented and maintained then this enables more effective and efficient service delivery in the homelessness sector.
Page 6 of 6

Innovation

Innovation ensures we continuously develop strategies, tools and programs to enhance the level of support available to vulnerable young people.  Examples of this include:

Cross-Organisational data collection to measure and understand our impact.

Couch-surfing research to address a critical knowledge gaps.

A focus on the intersection of homelessness and violence in recognition of the complexity of working with intimate partner and family violence in a homelessness context.

Youth-led practice informed by our Youth Participation Strategy to ensure young people’s voices and experience guide our work.

Evaluated trials of new programs that enable young people to be diverted from or transition out of the homelessness system.

 

View some of our programs

Research Guiding Principles

Research at BYS has four key guiding principles:

  1. Our research centres the voices and experiences of young people and their children, strategically prioritising forms of learning that have most capacity to benefit young people in navigating life challenges to thrive in the community.
  2. Our research is proactively collaborative and consultative in ensuring that we engage with academics, sector partners, community and young people at all stages.
  3. Our research upholds principles of reciprocity and pragmatism in ensuring that young people’s wellbeing is consistently the highest priority; and that research methods are adapted to ensure that young people benefit from their participation
  4. Our research recognises that young people’s experiences are highly complex, dynamic, intersectional and context-specific; and as such we strive to ensure that young people are ethically, respectfully and appropriately represented in all research outputs.