What is a Youth Indicators Profile?

A Youth Indicators Profile is one form of Social Indicator Profiles. The former focuses on the exploration of the situations of young people, while the latter is principally concerned with measuring the development status of an entire society in a given period.

A Youth Indicators Profile is simply a series of indicators and indexes used to measure the development status of young people, covering the four main areas of education, health, employment and effective participation. An Indicator reflects, on an integrated basis, the social phenomenon of a given aspect in a given period; a Profile is the cluster or consolidation of indicators obtained by successive measurements of individual indicators, manifesting patterns and interaction between indicators, and hence pointing to trends of specific phenomena.

A Youth Indicators Profile has five major functions: 1. Descriptive function, indicating “what the situation is” or currently “what status it is in”; 2. Explanatory function, explaining “why the situation is as such”; 3. Evaluation function, assessing the current situation as “good or bad”; 4. Monitoring function, warning “where has it gone wrong”, and 5. Predictive function, highlighting “the board direction of development in future”. Furthermore, such a profile can also form the basis for assessing social development, an indicator for changes in social phenomena and a supplement to economic indicators (Cheng 2004).  

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