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 2022 Youth Barometer is youth resilience - the ability to adapt, adjust, and recover. The survey explores, among other things, young people's experiences of uncertainty and adaptability, as well as the various difficulties they have encountered.
At the beginning, respondents assessed their satisfaction with their own lives and described their sense of meaning and control. They were asked whether they often experience stress, anxiety, depression, or loneliness. Respondents also reported whether they had experienced, for example, bullying, the loss of a loved one, substance abuse, or mental health problems.
Next, respondents described how often they were in contact with their friends and how strongly they felt they belonged to different communities, such as family, friend groups, hobbies, workplaces, or religious communities. They were also asked whether they belonged to a minority group. In addition, young people were asked to assess their trust in various societal institutions. Finally, they shared their opinions on substance use.
Background variables in the dataset include the respondent's region, age, gender, mother tongue, economic activity and occupational status, level of education, type of housing, and the mother's level of education.
The data for the Youth Barometer was collected from persons aged 15 to 29 living in mainland Finland using telephone interviews. In the first phase of data collection, a sufficient number of contact details for young people were drawn from the Population Information System using quota sampling. The purpose of quota sampling was to ensure that the respondents would represent as accurately as possible all 15-29-year-olds living in Finland. In practice, the quotas were based on four criteria: gender (female, male), age group (15-19, 20-24, 25-29), mother tongue (Finnish, Swedish, other), and region (18 regions in total). Altogether, contact details for 80,000 individuals aged 15-29 living in Finland were drawn from the register. The large sample size was due not only to expected non-response but also to the fact that only a minority of people in this age group have a phone number available. This time, a phone number was found for 32,323 individuals, or about 40% of those sampled.
After the register sampling and phone number matching, attempts were made to contact the selected young people, primarily by phone. All 32,323 individuals were contacted at least once. Of the phone numbers, 644 were no longer in use at the time of contact. For the valid phone numbers, the Youth Barometer used replacement sampling: if a selected individual did not answer or refused to participate, the next person in the same quota group (e.g., a 20-24-year-old Finnish-speaking woman) was contacted. This process continued until the desired number of interviews was reached for each quota. If a potential respondent was reached, they were first asked for consent to participate in the study. Even at this stage, many declined to participate: 12,469 reached individuals refused, and 20 interviews were interrupted. After accounting for missing or outdated phone numbers, refusals, and interruptions, a total of 1,864 young people were interviewed.