Youth attitude research Infrabel

Infrabel is a Belgian organisation, focusing on our train network, working hard every day to make train traffic go as smooth as possible. In doing so, it is very important that everyone, especially our youth, knows the risks and dangers of everything related to trains, railways, and level crossings. So together we, Trendwolves, wanted to know how our Belgian youth reacts to and acts around trains, railways, and level crossings. Read on to find out what interesting facts we learned from our youth.

Challenge: Infrabel wants to inform and warn our youth about the dangers involving trains, railways, and level crossings. Infrabel wants to work on their way of communication towards youth to be able to inform them in a way that grabs their attention and holds it. But to be able to do that, they needed to get to know our youth better, and that’s where we got involved. We were pleased to help Infrabel gather all the information necessary and analyse the information obtained. We couldn’t meet our youth in real life due to the COVID-19 situation for a long in-depth interview, so we decided to gather our information in two different ways. Luckily, thanks to our amazing network, we were able to gain valuable insights.

Approach: First we went out onto the streets to research how well Infrabel and the dangers involving railways, trains, and level crossings are known to our youth. After some pleasant and enriching conversations with these young people, we set up a more detailed conversation guide to use in 12 focus interviews with in total 24 Dutch and French-speaking youngsters.

We gauged their experiences involving railways, trains, and level crossings and we asked for the opinion about a few campaigns involving Infrabel or trains. We also discovered their favourite ways to communicate with each other and the world and we learned by who they got informed about the dangers involving train traffic.

These conversations lead to very interesting results which we analysed very carefully. Discussing the results with Infrabel was very fascinating and brought a lot of new insights of which we can’t wait to see how Infrabel will implement them in a new strategy to reach, teach and influence our Belgian youth.