What About Youth study

What About Youth report and main findings - this was published on 8 December 2015 and includes the smoking prevalence results. A full dataset is available in the UK Data Services Catalogue.

Public consultation findings - we undertook a public consultation on the survey in winter 2016, to ensure that any future survey continues to be relevant and still meets user needs.

The overall purpose was to collect robust local level data on a range of topics relating to young people, to help to drive an improvement in outcomes. The users and stakeholders would be local authority commissioners, policy makers, service providers and third-sector organisations.

We carried out the study on behalf of the Department of Health, with Ipsos MORI, an independent research agency, running the study.

Around 300,000 15 year-olds were randomly selected from the Department for Education's National Pupil Database (NPD), which contains details of every pupil in England. They were invited to complete a questionnaire about their health and wellbeing on paper or online. Around 120,000 completed questionnaires were returned. 

Data was collected on topics including smoking, emotional wellbeing, diet, physical activity, drugs, alcohol and bullying.

The answers given are completely confidential and nobody can be identified from our published results. The results collected are used for research purposes only.

You will never receive any junk mail as a result of speaking to us and we never pass on your details to other organisations for commercial purposes.

In 2015 we ran a short survey to get the views of potential users of WAY data on the planned outputs of the report. The results of this survey have now been collated and analysed and are available in our outcome paper.