Mind-changing Perspectives on Education: A Content Analysis of Young People’s Storytelling-based Interviews
Mind-changing Perspectives on Education: A Content Analysis of Young People’s Storytelling-based Interviews

Summary/Abstract: This article is based on the results obtained in our research activity carried out in the framework of the project Mind changers: Regions and Youth for Planet and People, funded through the European Commission's Development Education and Awareness Raising Programme (DEAR). The overall aim of the article is linked to the project’s main objective: to increase young people’s engagement in actions for change with regard to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at regional level. Taking into consideration that youth active participation and youth empowerment have become much-debated topics nowadays, it is important to identify the elements that could stimulate or hinder it in community activities at regional level. To this aim, we conducted an interview-based kind of research with young people from Dolj County, based on their high level of active engagement. The participants were identified with the help of the representatives of regional civil society organisations (CSOs) they work or collaborate with. The text corpus of the interviews resulted after transcription and translation into English was analysed using open coding (Straussand Corbin, 1990: 69; Creswell, 2015: 429; Cohen et al. 2018: 671) and content analysis to delimit elements that could later be used in educating young mind changers. We grouped the codes under different categories and only discussed the category related to ‘education’ in this article, with the aim to find out how education could encourage and contribute to youth engagement.

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