Listenability is a research project at the Australian National University (ANU), led by Dr Laura Davy. It runs across Australia and is co-designed with young people with disability and young carers.
What the project is about
Young people with disability and young carers deal with a lot of organisations: schools, universities and workplaces, government agencies like the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and Services Australia, and disability and carer support services. These organisations make decisions that affect their daily lives and their futures.
Governments and services increasingly say that they want to hear from the people who use them. Many have a duty to. But the ways they go about it often do not work well for young people, and may not lead to anything changing.
This project looks at why, and at what would work better.
Why listening?
When something is not working, young people are usually told to speak up.
But being heard is not only about speaking up. It also depends on the person or organisation doing the listening: whether they take young people seriously, whether they make it possible to communicate in different ways, and whether they act on what they hear.
So this project treats listening as the thing to examine closely. We are interested in what listening actually involves in practice, what gets in the way of it within organisations, and ways people and organisations can listen better.
What we want to find out
The project has three aims:
- To understand how much young people with disability and young carers feel heard by the organisations and institutions that affect their lives.
- To work out how those organisations can get better at listening to them.
- To do this together with young people with disability and young carers, through co-design and co-production.
How the research is being done
The project has two phases.
Phase one: Listening Together. Our co-design team built two accessible national surveys for young people with disability and young carers. The surveys asked what good listening means to them and whether they feel listened to. The surveys are now closed and the findings are published. Read the report.
Phase two: Listenability. We are now holding interviews and focus groups with young people with disability and young carers around Australia. We are also interviewing people who work in policy and in disability, carer and youth services, to hear how they think about listening and what makes it easier or harder inside their organisations.
Putting these two sets of conversations side by side lets us find examples of listening done well, and identify what needs to change in the wider systems that organisations work within.
How the project is co-designed
Co-design means that two or more people work together to make something, and everyone makes decisions together.
This project is co-designed by researchers at the ANU and a group of young people with disability and young carers. The co-design group has been meeting since September 2023, sometimes online and sometimes in person at the ANU. The group helped build the surveys, and is helping shape the interviews and focus groups, make sense of what people tell us, and decide how the findings are shared.
What the project will produce
As well as academic publications, the project will produce:
- a report on the findings in several formats, including a video summary, Easy English and Auslan
- a listening guide for policymakers and service providers, with practical guidance on listening to young people with disability and young carers
- a forum bringing researchers, policymakers and service providers together to discuss what we found
Funding
Listenability is funded by the Australian Research Council through the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) scheme, project number DE250100739.
The first phase of the project, Listening Together, was funded through the ANU Futures Scheme.
Listenability 