Young people’s suggestions for the assets needed in the transition to adulthood Mapping the research evidence
March 2019
Key points
- The Health Foundation launched its Young people’s future health inquiry in 2018, a first-of-its-kind research and engagement project that aimed to build an understanding of the influences affecting the future health of young people.
- At the beginning of the inquiry young people were consulted to reflect on what they felt were the most important factors in supporting a successful transition into adulthood.
- They identified four key assets. In this paper, we explored the extent to which the existing research literature had addressed each of the assets, and if so, what it showed about the asset’s role in a transition to adulthood.
This review suggested that the research literature has not paid as much attention to the transition to adulthood compared with experiences during the teenage years. Although all four of these areas receive a certain amount of research support in terms of their role in helping young people navigate their early 20s, the evidence is not definitive and the approaches taken to date have not been as nuanced and holistic as the model the young people proposed themselves. The young people in the Health Foundation’s future health inquiry have given us a set of plausible and legitimate hypotheses, and the next stage will be to further test these ideas in the quantitative data sets available to us.
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