Advisory Council for Youth Affairs (Nuora), nowadays called the State Youth Council, started to produce Youth Surveys in 1994. This survey series charts attitudes and expectations of Finnish young people aged 15 - 29. Each survey contains both current questions and recurring questions which are repeated over time, enabling the study of long-term attitude changes. The main themes include attitudes to education, working life, social security, spending, drug use, and young people's willingness to participate in order to influence decision-making.
The theme of the Finnish Youth Survey 2014 was equality. The survey is divided into the following topics: discrimination, social exclusion, future, social life, social trust, immigration and racism, social security, and satisfaction.
Relating to discrimination, the respondents were asked which things they considered discrimination (e.g. not receiving service in a restaurant because of ethnic background), whether they had witnessed discrimination against young people and where, and in what ways young people had been discriminated against. Personal experiences of and opinions on discrimination were charted by asking the respondents, for instance, whether they themselves had faced discrimination and where, when they had faced discrimination, what effects the discrimination had had, whether they had received help, how effective measures against discrimination were, and whether affirmative action was a good way to combat discrimination. Further questions examined whether the respondents had intervened if they had witnessed discrimination, and whether they had discriminated against others.
The questions about social exclusion investigated opinions on the reasons for exclusion/marginalisation (e.g. lack of education, own volition), and things that caused uncertainty or insecurity to the respondents (e.g. safety and health of family, personal loneliness). Concerning future, views were surveyed on own future, the future of Finland and the world as well as on the possibilities to influence own life. Relating to social life, the respondents were asked how often they saw, phoned, and contacted their friends on the Internet, how many close friends they had, whether they had friends from groups other than their own (e.g. people in sexual minorities), whether they belonged to a close-knit group of friends, and whether they considered themselves as a member of a youth subculture (e.g. goth, punk, skater).
The questions about social trust charted trust in people in general, and trust in people from other groups (e.g. people of different religion or creed). Relating to immigration and racism, the respondents were asked to what extent they agreed with some statements (e.g. "I have friends with immigrant background", "I cannot imagine having an immigrant as a spouse"). Regarding social security, the respondents were presented a number of statements about the sufficiency of social security in Finland. The respondents' satisfaction with their economic situation, leisure time, relationships, health, physical condition, appearance, and life on the whole was surveyed. Other questions investigated voting intention, participation in a civic organisation, health, and symptoms experienced in the previous six months.
Background variables included, among others, the respondent's gender, age, mother tongue, membership in a religious community, household composition, economic activity, country of birth, nationality, identification with various groups, education level, average grade of the latest report card as well as education levels and countries of birth of parents.
A random sample of 28,005 persons aged 15-29 living in continental Finland. Phone numbers were combined with other personal data, and the numbers were called until desired quotas were met. The quotas were based on gender, age group, mother tongue and major region.
A total of 1,903 interviews were conducted. The interviewees comprised 1,680 Finnish-speaking persons, 100 Swedish-speaking persons, and 123 persons with some other mother tongue. These numbers are representative of 15-29 year old people living in Finland.