Tapping the Pulse of Youth in Cosmopolitan South-Western and Western Sydney: Final Report

A research project funded by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. As a pilot project, the main purpose of this research was to test the efficacy of conducting surveys of minority young people in Australia as a way of gaining Tapping The Pulse of Youth in Western and South-Western Sydney 2 information that would provide insights into their lives and the ways that they connect to their friends, their family, and their community. The aim was to provide a snapshot of the attitudes and aspirations of young men and women from minority backgrounds living in Western and South-Western Sydney and of the state of inter-ethnic youth relations in the region that has the greatest density of minority youth in all Australia. This was because there were many claims about how Australian multicultural society was or was not working, but little evidence to back these claims. We were also interested to explore aspects of the lives of minority youth related to education, work, identity, people and place. We were also interested to demonstrate that if such research was fruitful, there was a case for extending the research to a larger sample. Moreover, we are mindful of the limits of a single survey, a snapshot of minority young people at a moment in time, and wanted to establish an argument for the commissioning of a four-year annual longitudinal study of 1000 youth in Western and South-Western Sydney so that we could follow minority youth, as well as a control sample of Anglo youth, over four years to see what happened to them over time. The research was designed to provide insights into: the attitudes, aspirations and social relations of multicultural youth in Sydney today; young people’s understandings and interpretations of Australian values and the Australian flag; their inter-ethnic social relations and social networks; and issues relating to safety and feelings of belonging, identity and trust among young people in Western and South-Western Sydney.