Youth not engaged in education, employment, or training: a discrete choice experiment of service preferences in Canada

Prior research has showed the importance of providing integrated support services to prevent and reduce youth not in education, employment, or training (NEET) related challenges. There is limited evidence on NEET youth’s perspectives and preferences for employment, education, and training services. The objective of this study was to identify employment, education and training service preferences of NEET youth. We acknowledge the deficit-based lens associated with the term NEET and use ‘upcoming youth’ to refer to this population group. Canadian youth (14–29 years) who reported Upcoming status or at-risk of Upcoming status were recruited to the study. We used a discrete choice experiment (DCE) survey, which included ten attributes with three levels each indicating service characteristics. Sawtooth software was used to design and administer the DCE. Participants also provided demographic information and completed the Global Appraisal of Individual Needs–Short Screener. We analyzed the data using hierarchical Bayesian methods to determine service attribute importance and latent class analyses to identify groups of participants with similar service preferences. A total of n=503 youth participated in the study. 51