Methodology

A targeted literature review was conducted with the goals of identifying current evidence-based and promising practices for child and youth engagement in policy development and developing a compendium of practices that could be shared across government departments. These offer public servants a point of reference for their child and youth engagement activities.

The scope of the review included English and French academic articles available through the following databases: Omni library catalogue (Waterloo University), ProQuest Social Sciences, Scopus, as well as Google Scholar. Searches were conducted using a combination of keywords. Searches for information from relevant organizations were conducted using Google and Google Scholar. For searches using Google, the first five pages of results were screened for relevance. Keywords and inclusion criteria are found in Appendix A.

Title and then abstract review were used for screening. Due to the targeted nature of this literature review, only the most relevant articles were reviewed fully. The inclusion criteria were expanded to include older articles when they were highly relevant or seminal literature. After review, a total of 50 academic publications (47 English and 3 French) and 23 organizational publications (22 English and 1 French) about practices were included (please see Appendix B for article selection).