The Challenge of Youth Engagement in Local Government: Exploring the Use of Youth Councils in Amherst and Halifax Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Youth councils are an increasingly popular tool that both government and non-governmental organizations use to inform policy and program development, to increase the participation of young people, and to improve the connection of youth to their communities and to civic life more broadly. In this thesis, the youth engagement experiences of local governments in Amherst, Nova Scotia, and Halifax Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia are examined. Both municipalities initiated youth councils in recent years in an attempt to consult on issues affecting youth in their communities. The two communities have experienced varied degrees of success in implementing these strategies. In broad terms, youth councils operated more successfully in the smaller, more self-contained community of Amherst than in the more sprawling urban municipality of the Halifax area. The divergent experiences of these two municipalities inform a discussion about the merits of youth councils as a tool for engagement for local governments. It is concluded that while youth councils can be both effective in terms of achieving immediate objectives, success is not easily reproduced in all scenarios and depends to a large extent on the characteristics of the community itself, the level of support from adults and facilitators, and the ability of the councils to meet their objectives and thus achieve legitimacy among stakeholders, creating a positive feedback look which engenders further effectiveness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".