Social Networks in Youth and Adolescence

John Cotterell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415359498
• eBook ISBN: 9781134240838
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This thoroughly revised new edition looks at the nature of social networks, their changing configurations, and the forces of influence they unleash in shaping the life experiences of young people between the ages of 12 and 25 years.

The author draws on both social and psychological research to apply network thinking to the social relations of youth across the domains of school, work and society. Network thinking examines the pattern and nature of social ties, and analyses how networks channel information, influence and support with effects on a wide range of life experiences. The book comprises eleven chapters, which contain discussion on key topics, such as youth transitions, network analysis, friendship, romantic ties, peer victimization, antisocial behaviour, youth risk-taking, school motivation, career influence, youth citizenship, and community organizations for young people. Chapters contain discussions of practical ways in which schools can provide support, and suggestions for youth organizations on how to assist young people to become effective citizens.

Part I
Networks and young
people

1 Young people and development

Change is a byword for any book that features adolescents or youth in its title. Young people are not only experiencing change personally, as they grow and develop from a young adolescent of 12 years of age to a young adult in their mid-twenties; they are also living in a society that is changing. Moreover, the forces impelling these changes — the internal processes of maturation, and the social changes associated with a global economy and an interconnected world — cannot be denied. The fact that change is inevitable does not have to mean an obligatory and passive acceptance of change; one may instead adapt, like the surfer, riding the waves of change with confidence and finesse and harnessing their force so as to shape one's own path through the waters. Human beings are not puppets on life's stage: they are agents of their own development; and by charting the broad parameters of youth development outlined in this chapter, we are better placed for understanding the issues that confront young people in the course of their development to adulthood. There is merging of previously different fields of social science as researchers place more value on what they hold in common than on what separates them. In keeping with such a view, literature from both the psychology of adolescence and the sociology of youth has been closely consulted for the topics discussed here. The value of this ‘zoom lens’ approach is that both the social and the personal can be brought into sharp focus, to benefit the discussions.

Change is viewed through different theoretical frames by writers on adolescence, youth, and young adults. Writers on adolescence customarily focus on intra-individual change — and associate such change with adolescent development. Typically, texts include several chapters describing the physical, cognitive and psychological changes that begin at approximately 10 and 11 years of age and continue for several years after this, so that the young person of 16 years of age looks and acts very differently from how s/he did when just a few years younger. The rapidity of these changes in physical stature and in thinking often evokes surprise. It seems that in a very brief period of time, the girl has become a young woman, and the boy has grown into a man. I recall encountering one of my son's friends, a boy of 15 at the time, who I had not seen for many months. He and my son were hunched over the home computer. As I greeted him, he stood up. He seemed taller than I remembered, so that he seemed to tower over me. Surprised at his sudden change in stature I blurted out, ‘Steve, what happened to you?’, which attracted his dry response: ‘I had my growth spurt.’

In texts on youth, a more collective viewpoint of young people is taken, where youth as a group or category are positioned within societal change, such as labour market changes, rural drift or community marginalization. Writers examine status changes among youth as a consequence of societal change and government policy, for example, the changing nature of skills in a globalized labour market, or the effects of youth training schemes in reducing youth unemployment. Writings on youth have employed concepts like pathways and lifepaths to capture the sense that the individual young person is on a journey which is both common to other young people in the same age cohort as well as having unique characteristics that individualize each young person's biography. The markers on the journey through life are statuses, such as school completion, stable employment, independent living, marriage and parenthood. But increasingly writers are teasing out the meaning of these markers when the transitions are unclear and uncertain, evident in the changes from school to work, from living with one's parents to independent living, from financial uncertainty to financial security, and indeed from ‘carefree’ youth to ‘responsible’ adulthood.

Development and change

In adolescent psychology, development is a central concept. Development results from continuous change over time in the way that the person perceives and interacts with the environment, and the direction of development is towards greater complexity, greater differentiation and greater organization of cognitive, affective, social and conative processes. Early frameworks explained development in terms of the satisfaction of needs, which were often related to the notion of biological drives, and needs continue to feature in modern texts on adolescent psychological development, such as the need to develop autonomy and gain a refined sense of identity. In the youth work field, Button (1974) applied the concept of needs to group work with adolescents. He listed four needs for youth workers to recognize and foster in adolescents: the need for companionship and affection, the need for security in order to manage uncertainty, the need for significance, and the need for adventure and new experience. In the work of Ryan and Deci (Ryan and Deci, 2000; Ryan and Powelson, 1991), three needs are emphasized as central to well-being: autonomy, competence and related-ness. The nature of these needs is explained as follows:

The need for competence is fulfilled by the experience that one can effectively bring about desired effects and outcomes, the need for autonomy involves perceiving that one's activities are endorsed by or congruent with the self, and the need for relatedness pertains to feeling that one is close and connected to significant others.

(Reis et al., 2000, p. 420)

In education, a concept that has been influential is that of developmental tasks (e.g. Havighurst, 1972); these are socially defined needs or goals whose mastery is required by society. The developmental tasks concept is associated with a lifespan view of development, and portrays the young person as an active agent in their own development. Recent formulation of lifespan theory by Hendry and Kloep (2002) has particular merit for the topics and age range discussed in this book, because it interprets the nature of a person's development in terms of resources for meeting the challenges that are posed by changing social contexts. The authors acknowledge a debt to the work of earlier lifespan theorists (e.g. Elder, 1998; Havighurst, 1972; Smith and Baltes, 1999), both in the way they portray the relation between the individual's lifecourse and the requirements of society, and in ‘the interconnections between earlier and later developmental events’ (Hendry and Kloep, 2002, p. 15). In normal circumstances, the individual is guided in dealing with developmental tasks by the normative nature of the timetable, as well as by advice and support from others. However, the increasing destandardization of the lifecourse can disturb the orderly nature of such task management, so that concerns that were resolved at an earlier point now reappear.

Arnett (2000) provides a positive perspective on young adult development. He suggests that ‘emerging adulthood’ is a time of life when future directions remain fluid and when the social roles associated with adulthood have yet to be adopted. Instead, there is an ‘experimental and exploratory quality’ (p. 471) to young people's lives, expressed in particular in three ‘domains of self-sufficiency’ — love, work, and world-views. What is interesting is the distinction that Arnett makes between the ‘transient and tentative explorations’ in adolescence and the ‘focused explorations’ linked to choice behaviour that are detected among young people in their early twenties. For example, in the love domain, he contrasts the brief romantic attachments that occur in adolescence, which are based on recreational activity, often within group contexts, with the serious and more enduring romantic relationships established in emerging adulthood, which are focused on feelings and communication. In the work domain, he contrasts the adolescent attitude towards jobs as being for pay rather than for skill development, with the attitude of older youth, where a job is valued for what it contributes to their future direction and the discovery of what kind of work they like and are good at doing.

Young people in transition

Current research views adolescence, youth and early adulthood as connected periods comprising a series of transitions, with each constellation of transition events requiring some reorganization of behaviour, role, or psychological functions. Transitions common to young people include the transition to secondary school, from school to the workforce, and leaving home to live independently. These changes in setting expose people to new roles and relations that require social and psychological adaptation. For example, a young adolescent wrote about the personal changes that accompanied her entry into secondary school in these words: ‘I have grown up in the last few weeks more than I did all last year.’

This book explores the psychosocial transitions associated with different periods of the lifecourse from adolescence to young adulthood, and acknowledges that the social development concerns of young people vary in salience across these different periods. For young adolescents, attention is directed to their social world in and out of school, in order to appreciate the significant changes in friendship that occur, and their wider consequences. By examining the patterns of adolescent interaction within friendship cliques, we are able to understand the value and importance of peer acceptance and friend intimacy, and the devastating consequences of peer rejection on individual young people. Similarly, attention to the classroom experiences of adolescents in the early years of secondary school can supply insights into the process of disengagement that leads some young people to drop out before they have completed their schooling.

Older adolescents and youth experience a different set of transitions as they spread their wings beyond the home and school and encounter more diverse groups of people. Environmental changes include the social and academic adjustments to college and the first job, and exposure to leisure settings where heavy drinking of alcohol is featured. Youth also come into contact with adults outside their family, some of whom become mentors or models for them. The implications of leisure settings as influences on health risk are discussed, as well as the potential of new settings for positive youth development through opportunities for involvement in youth citizenship.

In an essay on transitions from a developmental psychology perspective, Graber and Brooks-Gunn (1996) draw attention to the potential for transitions to affect individual young people in different ways, depending on such factors as timing of the events, the cumulation of effects, and whether certain characteristics of an individual are highlighted or subjected to particular pressure. They discuss transitions from a lifecourse perspective, including the concept of trajectory. Developmental trajectory includes the direction of change, using knowledge of factors and influences observed over a considerable period of time to assess how much the individual lifecourse follows a predicted path. There is an implication that transitions follow an orderly and predictable succession. When circumstances are at odds with this sense of order, young people encounter disrupted or fragmented transitions, which may seriously affect their individual development.

The notion that the trajectories are predictable through adolescence, varying only in terms of social class, gender and ethnicity, is challenged by research in the youth field. Recent evidence suggests that the trajectory of development is far more varied and unpredictable and that the transition from adolescence to adulthood extends well beyond the teenage years into young adulthood. For example, the difficulties associated with the extended transition to work have ‘created exceptional problems for beginning workers’ (Roberts, 1997, p. 348). Roberts recalls that in the mid-1980s the ESRC longitudinal research program chose to focus on the 16- to 19-year-old age group with the assumption that by the age of 19 years, the majority of the cohort would have completed the transition to employment. By the end of the twentieth century, it was obvious across the developed countries that such optimism was ill-founded, and that young people were taking much longer to attain employment stability.

Evidence that youth are more vulnerable to unemployment than is generally true for adults comes from the 1997 OECD figures for twenty countries. These show that the rate of unemployment for young people aged 15 to 24 years was on average 2.4 times the unemployment rate for those aged 25 to 54 years, and ranged from 1.1 (Germany) to 4.0 (Greece). In Australia, 37 per cent of the unemployed in the first three-quarters of 1998 were young people. Clearly, the prospects of stable and full-time employment in many western countries are not altogether rosy for the youth generation. However, unlike youth during the 1980s, today's youth are drawn from a smaller birth cohort, making their problems less visible than would be the case if they were more numerous. Indeed, in the summer of 1983, the proportion of adolescents in the US population was exceeded by the proportion of persons over 60 years of age for the first time in the country's history.

Social commentators have noted that the standard paths to a defined adulthood have dissolved in recent times, and that the certainties of previous generations about the connection between future, present and past for the assembly of one's biography are no longer evident. They refer to the erosion of a linear view of time, replaced by an emphasis on ‘randomness’ (Sennett, 1998) where planning for the future has no meaning. Chisholm and Du Bois-Reymond (1993) questioned whether ‘youth’ as a classically understood label for a whole age-cohort still exists, given what they saw as the fragmentation of the rites de passage from childhood to adulthood. Wyn and Dwyer (1999) comment that, ‘Life experiences and future prospects of this generation are more complex and less predictable than those of their predecessors’ (p. 5). Experts on youth speak of a ‘choice biography’, drawing attention to the ‘destandardization’ of biography (Brannen and Nilsen, 2002) and the removal of agreed markers of adulthood. Some celebrate this for the freedom and flexibility it offers youth; others warn of the psychological costs on youth of continual exertion and watchfulness. Delay in commitment is characteristic of a choice biography, so that people strive to remain flexible rather than be boxed in by a job, a place, or a relationship. What intrigues Du Bois-Reymond (1998) is that European youth do not like the concept of adulthood; they equate it with ‘dullness and routine’ and are fearful that as adults they will ‘lose their playful attitude and become serious, boring and responsible’ (p. 74). Brannen and Nilsen (2002) remarked that, for some youth, adulthood is seen as a phase ‘reserved for the distant future’ (p. 522).

Moreover, uncertainty regarding the future extends well into their twenties, even for young people who have tertiary qualifications or impressive employment histories.¹ Writing about youth in Britain, Ahier and Moore (1999) argue that social changes in work and family and changes in government policies relating to young people ‘combine to make the situation of youth less secure, less predictable and structured, enforcing a much more protracted period of ambiguous dependency’ (p. 516). Furlong cites uncertainty in young people's lives, their separation from adults, and the lengthening of the pre-adult phase of life as contributing to ‘the increased length and complexity of youth as a phase of the life cycle’ (Furlong, 2000, p. 130). Brannen and Nilsen (2002) conclude that ‘the way that young people navigate the transition to adulthood is influenced by their perception and experience of time’ (p. 531).² From interview material, they suggest three approaches to adulthood taken by youth: deferment, adaptability, and predictability. Only the last of these shows planning and progression to adulthood; the other routes reveal reluctance to engage with the future or restless pursuit of change and impermanency. These restless patterns of non-engagement with the future, in the generation labelled twixters, kippers, freezers, and boomerang kids (see Grossman, 2005), have deep implications for society. Already the reverberations are widely detected among adolescent students in motivational problems in school and in the decline of job commitment among young adults.

This portrait is not restricted to the experience of young adults; it affects younger adolescents and youth in educational settings as well. They hear about the twixters; they see older siblings not yet settled; they listen to stories from youth who have left school. They realize that education is no guarantee of economic security, and that the separation of school and work is an artificial one. The perpetuation of a division between school as a place to learn, and work as a place to apply what has been learned, makes it difficult for modern youth to balance the competin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Adolescence and Society
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of boxes and tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction and overview
• PART I Networks and young people
• PART II Social networks
• PART III Social influences
• PART IV Social support
• Notes
• References
• Author index
• Subject index