Effectiveness of user involvement in institutions for children and youth

Key message

 Key message

The Norwegian Knowledge Centre was commissioned by the Norwegian Directorate for Children, Youth and Family Affairs to conduct a systematic literature search with a subsequent categorization of relevant research. The commission was to identify research on the effectiveness of user involvement in institutions for children and youth.

Methods

In February 2016, a search specialist carried out the literature search in 11 social and medical scientific databases from 2000 to February 2016. Two researchers independently screened all identified references to assess inclusion according to predefined criteria. 

Results

The literature search resulted in 3459 unique References.

Only 1 relevant study was included. This study was a randomized controlled trial which evaluated a counselling method for children and youth, called “Counselling in dialogue”. The method aimed to increase the quality of counselling and shared decision making by children and youth. It is unclear whether the children were in institutions.

We also identified 19 other publications that could be relevant, although they failed to meet the inclusion criteria.

There is limited international documentation about the effectiveness of user involvement for children and youth in institutions. In this systematic literature search we have not read the publications in full and hence not critically evaluated the studies. We have only sorted the references by type, based on the abstracts