The Connected Belonging Questionnaire (CBQ) as a Youth Voice Measure: Operationalizing an intersectional lens to engage young people

A sense of school belonging predicts NEET outcomes for adolescents. However, young people from marginalized groups often have a lower sense of school belonging than their majority peers. Emerging understandings of belonging as a complex, agentic process shaped by multiple relational, contextual, cultural and structural factors have posed problems for real-world applications of belonging. NEET young people tend to be viewed through a lens of risk factors, with a lack of research accounting for their experiences and feelings. While recent research recognizes the intersectional effects of disadvantage, or ‘compound disadvantage’, on NEET outcomes for young people from certain social groups, there is a lack of viable alternatives for educators and policymakers to account for these differential experiences of belonging in order to be able to respond to them. Connected Belonging is a relational and identity-building approach to enhancing young people’s wellbeing through supporting their connectedness and sense of self across the eight social domains of their lives. This paper outlines the development and validation of a young people’s survey, which enables education professionals to attend to and respond to the differing belonging experiences of diverse groups, operationalizing an intersectional lens on school belonging. After introducing the views of young people about systemic priorities to better support their engagement in education, training or work (EET), gathered through a youth voice event as part of a parallel research project, the paper outlines the process of developing, piloting and validating the tool. We argue that this survey tool has the potential to support improved attention to the views and experiences of diverse young people in a systematic, regular fashion. Furthermore, it offers potential for the evaluation of supportive actions grounded in youth voice.