Youth survey

Every young person's voice counts

The CTC youth survey is the instrument that turns a community's intuitions about its young people into data. It is a standardised, anonymous questionnaire completed by pupils, usually between the ages of eleven and seventeen, and it measures the risk and protective factors described on the approach page as they actually occur in one particular place. The pupils who answer are the community's measuring instrument; the prevention that follows is for every child and young person in that community, from the youngest up.

The survey was developed alongside CTC itself at the University of Washington and has been adapted and translated wherever the approach is used, and tested psychometrically in several countries, among them Germany, Croatia, Estonia and, at pilot level, Greece. Its questions are not arbitrary: each item traces back to decades of international research on which circumstances shape adolescent wellbeing and behaviour. National adaptations adjust wording, drop items that do not apply, and re-test reliability, but the underlying structure stays comparable, which is what made the CTC European Network's cross-national comparison possible.

What is asked, and why

Think of risk factors as stumbling blocks along a young person's path: they raise the likelihood of health or social difficulties. Protective factors are the handrails: they strengthen young people and help them handle what comes. The survey looks at both, across four settings.

Peers and the individual. What are relationships with peers like? What attitudes do young people themselves hold? An item such as I like to see how far I can go captures a tendency to test limits, which in some contexts is a risk factor. What do you think of someone your age using drugs? captures how accepted alcohol and drug use is within a peer group.

Family. What support does the family provide, and how is conflict handled? This section asks explicitly about strengths as well as problems. My parents ask my opinion when something that affects me has to be decided measures whether a young person feels included and valued, a protective factor. Do you get on well with your mother or father? targets the quality of the relationship. Items about problem behaviour in the family, such as whether anyone has ever used hard drugs, are necessary to detect risk, and they are always asked under anonymity and analysed only in aggregate.

School. How comfortable do young people feel at school? Do they experience pressure or success? It takes an effort for me to go to school points to low commitment to school.

Community and neighbourhood. How safe and supportive is the area perceived to be? If you wanted to, how hard or easy would it be for you to get hold of drugs where you live? measures perceived availability, one of the clearest community-level risk factors.

What the community gets back

Results are never reported for individuals or for classes. The community receives a profile: which risk factors are elevated and which protective factors are weak, compared where possible against a regional or national benchmark. Schools that take part usually receive their own aggregated report. From that profile the CTC coalition chooses the two to five factors it will work on, and it is those priorities, not a general sense that something should be done, that determine which programmes it then selects. The survey is the centre of phase three of the process, and it is repeated at least every two years once the action plan is running.

Who is surveyed, who benefits

The survey asks young people of secondary-school age because that is where risk and protective factors can be measured reliably. By eleven or twelve a young person can report on their family, their school, their friends and their neighbourhood, and the behaviours that prevention is meant to avert, from first alcohol use to violence and dropping out, begin to show. The answers are not a verdict on those pupils. They are a description of the conditions under which all the children of the community are growing up.

Those conditions start long before secondary school. Low family attachment, inconsistent parenting, an early lack of commitment to school and the availability of substances in the neighbourhood take shape in the first years of life and in primary school. A community profile that shows them as elevated therefore points the action plan at the whole age range, not only at the year groups that filled in the questionnaire: family programmes for parents of infants and toddlers, early-childhood settings and primary schools, transition years, youth work and the wider neighbourhood. The goal of CTC is that every child in the community, whatever their age, is reached by the prevention that follows from the data, and that the next survey, two or three years later, measures whether it worked.

Anonymity, consent and ethics

The survey is anonymous by design. No name, no date of birth and no identifier that could single out a pupil is collected, and responses are stored and analysed only at the level of a school year or an area. Participation is voluntary twice over: parents or guardians are informed and can withhold consent, and each pupil can decline or stop at any point. Every administration is agreed with the responsible education authority beforehand, and the data processing is set up to meet the GDPR; the details differ by country and are documented by the organisation that runs the survey there.

The questionnaire itself is a protected instrument. It is provided to communities that run a CTC process together with the organisation that holds the adapted version in their country; it is not published, because a survey whose items are public loses its value as a measurement tool.

Across Europe

The German version was validated at the University of Hildesheim and runs online through the Crime Prevention Council of Lower Saxony, with automated community and school reports benchmarked against a state-wide representative sample. The Netherlands adapted the survey as early as 1999; Croatia first used a translated version in Istria in 2004 and published its adapted questionnaire in 2010; Cyprus ran a Greek-language version in the Nicosia district in 2007. Sweden built its version in the CTC European Network project, which then compared all of them across borders. Estonia, Greece and Portugal adapted the survey in 2022 and piloted it in 2022–2023; the Estonian version was tested with 265 pupils in Hiiumaa and Märjamaa and has been run in the three Estonian pilot communities since autumn 2025, and the Portuguese version, built at Iscte in Lisbon, was tested with 1,218 pupils in the Azores. Croatia is building a digital version of its questionnaire in the DIGIPREV project (2025–2029, with Varaždin County and CARNET), including a longitudinal survey in one county and a digital interface for local decision-makers. Ireland's first survey, in Newbridge, County Kildare, was prepared with Trinity College Dublin and presented its first results at the EUSPR conference in Dublin in September 2026. The pilot covered four post-primary schools and more than 1,600 pupils aged 12 to 18 and used the American 2014 questionnaire with minor cultural adaptations; an Irish validation has not yet been published.

If your community is considering a first survey, the country directory shows who to talk to, and the frequently asked questions cover response rates, timelines and what happens to the data.