Outcome 5: Young people consider risk, make reasoned decisions and take control

Outcome 5 explores whether young people understand the consequences of harmful behaviour, know where to go to access information and support, and can assess that information to ensure it is appropriate and helpful.

Outcome 5 also focuses on young people taking responsibility for the decisions they make. The indicators for this outcome have particular application when exploring specific topics related to harmful or risky behaviour: alcohol or drug use, sexual health, sexting, bullying, self-harm, etc.

There are three component parts to this outcome:

Consider risk
Reasoned decisions
Take control

Like all of the Youth Work Outcomes, Outcome 5 and its indicators can be can be used to measure changes in an individual or within a group or project.

Download the full list of outcomes and indicators.

How to use the indicators

There are 10 indicators for you to choose from to help you measure this outcome. You do not need to select all of them. You should select the indicators that are most relevant and useful for your planning and self-evaluation, and those that really help you understand if your youth work is making a difference.

When using the outcomes and indicators, you need to translate or apply them to your local youth work context. The following questions can help you do this and you can use our Translating Indicators template to help you with this process.

What does Outcome 5 mean within the context of the projects or youth work you have selected? Outcome 5 can be applied to a whole service, a project or programme or an individual youth work session.
Which indicators are most relevant and useful to your youth work?
What do your selected indicators mean in the context of your youth work?
What does success look like?
How will you measure the indicators?
Who will collect the data?
How will you store the data?
How will you use the data for reflection and service improvement?

Indicators

Please select an indicator to find more details and suggested ways of measuring it. You should also consider if there are other indicators that you could develop which would be useful to measure this outcome.

	Indicator	Which part of the outcome does it measure?
1	Young people explain the consequences of harmful behaviour on themselves	Consider risk
2	Young people explain the consequences of harmful behaviour on others	Consider risk
3	Young people know where to go for information and support	Consider risk
4	Young people ask for information and support	Consider risk
5	Young people identify risk and explain it to others	Consider risk
6	Young people understand the role of peer pressure in harmful behaviour	Consider risk
7	Young people critically assess information	Reasoned decisions
8	Young people often make informed decisions	Reasoned decisions
9	Young people explain why they have made a choice	Reasoned decisions
10	Young people take responsibility for their actions	Take control

Within each indicator, there are suggestions of how you might measure that particular indicator but this is not an exhaustive list. You can come up with your own way of measuring the indicator and the toolkits in the Other tools to help you section might also be helpful.