Data roles: youth mental health outcome measures and the young people who defy them

Abstract Health measurement shapes peoples’ political relationships with the state, with services, with one another, and with oneself. But what are the political dynamics at play when people can’t/won’t/don’t have health measurements taken? And what is the political predicament of those whose needs, values, and experiences don’t fit within the measures available? This paper presents a case study of one youth mental health service’s efforts to improve their collection of outcome measures, and reinvigorates the concept of ‘sick role’ to describe young people as defying the ‘data roles’ expected of them. The concept of data roles draws attention to the political dynamics of measurement on two interlinked scales: the interpersonal, embodied measurement encounter; and the systemic care-measurement assemblage. In the case reported here, measures are hard to collect given the ‘routinized intimacy’ required, and the restrictive, normative, individualised understandings of need inscribed within available measures. Yet defying measurement equates to a marginalised, precarious political position for young people and for the services that support them. In sum, the data roles expected of young people ask too much of them, and do too little for them.