Coping with COVID-19: Young people’s health and wellbeing in Australia

Past project

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented disruption to the lives of populations across the globe, including in Australia. Interruptions to study disproportionately affected young people aged 15-29 years.

Similarly, the closure of non-essential businesses in the hospitality and retail sector meant significant job losses among a workforce of young people on casual contracts with few job protections.

Objective

Although young people are underrepresented in morbidity and mortality directly related to COVID-19, they bore a large burden of the societal costs of the pandemic and related responses. It is therefore essential that we try to understand how COVID-19 has impacted on their lives, their health and behaviours.

Given the rapidly unfolding nature of this situation, this information was best captured in both large-scale surveys and in-depth qualitative research targeted at key populations at risk.

Young people are, however, resilient, resourceful and entrepreneurial, and we have much to learn from them. For this reason, we seek their engagement in designing public health solutions to help young people and others cope in these times of uncertainty.

Timeline

Surveys were conducted at three-month intervals over 16 months from April 2020 to August 2021.

Approach

Co-design, an approach borne from the Human-Centred Design field, has been increasingly recognised as a useful method of generating acceptable, innovative responses to public health problems.

It can be conducted in a rapid, intensive sequence of understanding the problem from the user/population’s perspective, defining the key issue to address, ideating solutions to that problem and iterating prototypes of solutions.

Participants in the survey were asked to share their song recommendations so we could compile them in a Coping with COVID Spotify playlist.