Power of Mobile Peer Groups: A Design-Oriented Approach to Address Youth Unemployment

Abstract

To investigate the societal value of digital peer groups in the context of youth unemployment, one of society’s most pressing problems, we developed a novel mobile peer-group-based career counseling approach. Following a design-oriented methodology, we constructed an intervention in which we supplement offline one-on-one counseling sessions between youths and career counselors with mobile peer groups where youths can support one another in a trusting environment, independent of time and place. We evaluated the career counseling intervention, implemented on a WhatsApp platform, in a randomized field experiment conducted at the German Federal Employment Agency. Results suggest that the mobile peer-group-based career counseling approach offers substantial added value compared with traditional career counseling. It significantly increases a youth’s chances of finding employment while improving his or her attitude towards career choice, career maturity, and career search intensity. Our study contributes to literature on the societal impacts of information and communication technologies and to research in design science. The proposed mobile intervention has important policy implications for addressing youth unemployment.

Key words:

• and phrases: societal benefits of ICT
• mobile peer group
• online peer group
• youth unemployment
• unemployment mitigation
• field experiment

Acknowledgments

We gratefully thank the Federal Employment Agency in Baden-Wuerttemberg for supporting us in conducting our experiment. Furthermore, we express our gratitude for the assistance of the Dr. Theo and Friedl Schoeller Research Center for Business and Society and the many advisors and reviewers whose valuable comments and suggestions improved this paper considerably.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. “Problem relevance” is a core design science research guideline [56]

2. In its initial design, the program was conducted in small face-to-face groups of job-seekers and used several procedures to support members in their searches. For instance, job clubs paired job-seekers in a buddy system to help members support each other emotionally, provided instructions and information on obtaining and sharing job leads and applying for jobs, and initiated family support. Job clubs were designed as full-time activities with daily meetings of several hours under the direction of a trained job club specialist.

3. To protect the privacy of subjects, although the conversation in the illustration is an actual one, participant names have been changed.

4. Children of compulsory school age who are not accepted for an apprentice position or secondary school have to fulfil compulsory schooling on other ways, such as by completing a voluntary social year or attending measures for vocational orientation.

5. Given the context of career counseling and vocational training, we neglected further outcomes applied in previous research such as unemployment duration [6] and starting salary [6].

6. Based on feedback received from the Federal Employment Agency and an analysis of the psychometric properties of the scales, we revised the instrument used in the pre-survey for the final post-test measurement of variables.

7. Höft et al. [59] assessed decision behavior based on three items, but since our analysis indicated that its reliability could be increased substantially by excluding one item, we decided to use a two-item scale.

8. For this study, it is of particular interest whether subjects received a binding employment assurance. Since mobile peer-group-based career counseling did not support or favor a specific assurance type such as an apprentice position, entry to a higher secondary school or voluntary year, we summarized all three items in one variable. Moreover, the specific assurance types seemed to be mutually exclusive to a great extent. Therefore, this coding procedure seemed acceptable in our context.

9. Previous research on offline peer groups in the context of employment has found comparable effect sizes with a change in employment due to treatment of 63.6% for general job-seekers [6], 94.1% [7] and 99.0% [123] for welfare recipients, 143.1% for job-seekers older than 50 years [110] and 239.3% for physically and mentally handicapped job seekers [7]. Note, however, that this direct comparison overestimates effect sizes of previous studies, as in these studies, peer support was amended and/or supplemented with other procedures such as buddy systems and family support.

10. We tested our artifact in cooperation with career counselors not only at the Federal Employment Agency in Baden-Württemberg but also spread the idea Germany-wide – the director of the Federal Employment Agency in Baden-Württemberg presented it to more than 500 career counselors. The approach is also being discussed as an element of the lifelong-learning strategy of the Labor Agency beyond the age group of youth.

11. Qualitatively, counselors reported one to two offline meetings in the three months of the experiment; they did not document any differences between treatment and control groups. We did not measure intensity of offline counseling quantitatively, however, so we cannot statistically compare treatment and control groups.

12. In case of small frequencies, we performed an exact test by Fisher [44]. For these variables (gender, migration background, type of school degree, and previous internships), we used the exact significance (two-tailed) instead of the asymptotic significance (two-tailed).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julia Klier

Julia Klier ([email protected]) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Management Information Systems at the University of Regensburg, Germany. Her main research interests include social media with a special focus on online social networks, e-government, and electronic customer relationship management. She received her doctorate in Management Information Systems from the University of Augsburg, Germany. She published her work in the proceedings of international conferences, such as International Conference on Information Systems and in journals, such as Computer Networks, ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, and Business & Information Systems Engineering. In 2014 she was recognized with the Schöller Fellow Award.

Mathias Klier

Mathias Klier ([email protected]) holds the Péter Horváth Endowed Professorship for Business Administration with focus on Business Information Management at the Institute of Technology and Process Management at the University of Ulm, Germany. He received his doctorate in Management Information Systems from the University of Augsburg, Germany. His main research interests include Data and Information Quality, Customer Relationship Management, and Social Media with a special focus on Online Social Networks. Dr. Klier has published his papers in books and journals, such as Decision Support Systems, Electronic Markets, and Communications of the Association for Information Systems, and presented his research at international conferences such as the European Conference on Information Systems and the International Conference on Information Systems.

Lea Thiel

Lea Thiel ([email protected]) is an Associated Researcher at the Department of Management Information Systems at the University of Regensburg, Germany. She is also a project leader with an international strategy consulting firm. Her main research interests include social media with a special focus on online social networks, e-government, and electronic customer relationship management. She received her doctorate in Management Information Systems from the University of Regensburg, Germany. Dr. Thiel presented her work at international conferences such as the International Conference on Information Systems and the European Conference on Information Systems and in scientific journals such as Electronic Markets.

Ritu Agarwal

Ritu Agarwal ([email protected]; corresponding author) is Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research, Distinguished University Professor and the Robert H. Smith Dean’s Chair of Information Systems at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the founder and Co-Director of the Center for Health Information and Decision Systems at the Smith School. Her current research is focused on the use of IT in healthcare settings and health analytics. Dr. Agarwal has published over 100 papers on health informatics and information technology management topics in journals such as Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Management Science, Journal of Management Information Systems, Communications of the ACM, Health Affairs, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, and IEEE Transactions, and has made presentations at a variety of national and international conferences. She served as Editor-in-Chief of Information Systems Research. She is a Fellow of the Association for Information Systems, Distinguished Fellow of the Information Systems Society of INFORMS, and has received Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award from the University of Maryland.