Understanding Youth Participation Across Europe

From Survey to Ethnography

Hilary Pilkington, Gary Pollock, Renata Franc, Hilary Pilkington, Gary Pollock, Renata Franc

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781137590060
• eBook ISBN: 9781137590077
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Draws on a high profile, large scale European research project which covered over 14 countries

Offers a unique methodological approach

Challenges the methodological assumption that survey research shows the big picture but at the cost of local nuance

© The Author(s) 2018

Hilary Pilkington, Gary Pollock and Renata Franc (eds.)Understanding Youth Participation Across Europehttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59007-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Thinking Globally, Understanding Locally

Gary Pollock¹ , Hilary Pilkington² and Renata Franc³

(1)

Head of Sociology, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK

(2)

School of Social Sciences (Sociology), University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

(3)

Ivo Pilar Institute of Social Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia

Gary Pollock (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Hilary Pilkington

Email: [email protected]

Renata Franc

Email: [email protected]

Gary Pollock

is Professor and Head of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has been involved in youth research for over 20 years, and is interested in using survey data to examine young people in society in terms of their social and political outlook, as well as their employment and family trajectories. He is co-editor (with Hilary Pilkington) of Radical Futures? Youth, Politics and Activism in Europe, Sociological Review Monograph Series (April 2015). He was also the Project Coordinator of the FP7 MYWEB project, which examined the feasibility of a longitudinal study of children and young people across the EU.

Hilary Pilkington

is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. She has a long-standing research interest in youth and youth cultural practices, post-socialist societies, and qualitative, especially, ethnographic research methods. She has been coordinator of a number of large, collaborative research projects, including the FP7 MYPLACE project (http://​www.​fp7-myplace.​eu), and is a member of the coordinating team of the H2020 PROMISE project. Most recently, she is author of ‘Loud and Proud’: Passion and Politics in the English Defence League (Manchester University Press, 2016), co-author of Punk in Russia: Cultural Mutation from the ‘Useless’ to the ‘Moronic’ (Routledge, 2014) and co-editor (with Gary Pollock) of Radical Futures? Youth, Politics and Activism in Europe (Wiley, 2015).

Renata Franc

is Senior Research Fellow at the Ivo Pilar Institute of Social Sciences and, as a full professor, she teaches courses in the field of social and political psychology at the University of Zagreb. Her current research interests include social attitudes, youth involvement, and well-being. She has extensive experience of leading and participating in national and international research projects (FP7 MYPLACE, 2011–2015; FP7 MYWEB, 2014–2016). Currently, she is a member of the research team on the H2020 PROMISE (2016–2019) project and the Longitudinal study of well-being in Croatia (CRO-WELL, 2015–2019, Croatian Science Foundation). She is Editor-in-Chief of Drustvena istrazivanja (Journal for General Social Issues).

End Abstract

Research agendas increasingly call for large-scale, interdisciplinary, multi-method and comparative research approaches. There is an intrinsic benefit to this embedded in the learning process of working across disciplines, and historical and social contexts. However, the compromises made in order to develop common research instruments across very different contexts may inhibit the deeper understanding of phenomena that is possible when working within a particular approach, or obscure the local or national factors essential for a nuanced interpretation of findings. This volume draws on the experience of conducting pan-European research into young people’s civic and political engagement to argue that an integrated, multi-method, case study approach can allow researchers to ‘think globally’ while retaining the necessary sensitivity to local and national context to ‘understand locally’.

In this introductory chapter, we outline the central research question and methodological approach underpinning the MYPLACE project. We show how multiple research methodologies—questionnaire survey, semi-structured interviews, expert interviews, focus groups and participant observation—were applied in 30 case study locations in 14 countries across Europe in order to provide a holistic understanding of young people’s political and civic engagement. The chapter sets out the rationale for the case study approach adopted in the project and the process by which research locations were selected. Finally, without pre-empting the more extensive discussions of our understanding and implementation of context-sensitive survey research, meta-ethnographic synthesis of qualitative data and triangulation of quantitative and qualitative data (explored in Chaps. 2, 5 and 9), the chapter points to the potential added explanatory value that can be derived from this approach, as well as the challenges it generates.

Framing the Research

The MYPLACE project was born out of a desire to understand the ways in which young people engage in politics and society across Europe. It was developed, specifically, as a response to the EU’s Framework Programme 7 call, which asked researchers to consider: ‘Democracy and the shadows of totalitarianism and populism: the European experience’. From its inception, however, the project was conceived to understand not only how the past has shaped the present, but also to look simultaneously to the past, present and future. The project’s central objective was, thus, to map the relationship between political heritage, current levels and forms of civic and political engagement of young people in Europe, and their potential receptivity to radical and populist political agendas.

This required a multi-directional—past, present, future—approach since, we conjectured, any understanding of the future propensity for certain groups of young people to engage with radical, extreme and populist forms of politics would require an appreciation of the present, everyday lives and contexts of those young people. Moreover, understanding young people’s lives in the present would necessitate an exploration of how important historical events in the past may have shaped their current context.

From the outset, moreover, ‘the European experience’ was understood in MYPLACE in the plural. The ‘shadows of the past’ element of the call connoted a strong assumption of a political path dependency whereby contemporary democratic shortcomings were seen as rooted in national histories. It was important to us to subject this assumption to critical analysis and to explore the possibility that there would be situations where local, contemporary factors were more important than more distant, historical ones. This was translated into the research design through an emphasis on the need for the data collected to be analysed within historically and culturally sensitive contexts.

This concern with the influences of history and local context had methodological implications. A focus on identifying deep understandings of attitudes and behaviour through ethnographies or interviews may successfully capture the unique experiences and views of individual young people participating in the research but, conducted in isolation, risked generating a partial account. By contrast, a focus on systematically measuring the views and behaviours of a large number of young people may generate a representative picture of young people’s civic and political engagement, but could produce an overly descriptive representation, unable to identify real meanings and understandings. We concluded that, to capture the influence of historical, structural and cultural factors, and to achieve both validity and generalisability in relation to our young respondents, required more than any single method could deliver.

Research Questions

MYPLACE was designed to investigate a common set of research questions using a shared methodology. If local context was so important, one may ask, why embark on a single project rather than a series of separate, locally devised projects operating in parallel and comparing their findings post hoc? In part, this volume sets out the case for the ‘value added’ of what the EU calls a ‘large-scale integrating project’ and invites readers to draw their own conclusions as to the merits and limitations of such a venture. In our view, the ambitious research questions that we set out to tackle warranted such a complex research design; any narrower focus would have prejudiced the analysis and limited the scope of our findings.

The central research question of MYPLACE was: How is young people’s social participation shaped by the shadows of totalitarianism and populism in Europe? Beneath this overarching question lie a number of key research objectives.

Firstly, MYPLACE sought to provide a nuanced and contextualised account of young people’s social participation (including civic and political engagement) that was sensitive to regional, national and European historical factors. This was facilitated by a case study-based survey that measured young people’s political and civic attitudes and participation and was followed up by semi-structured interviews with a sub-sample of the survey respondents. Our analysis sought to understand not only local and national differences, but also how attitudes and engagements were differentiated along lines of gender, ethnicity, class and region.

Secondly, we aimed to understand the ‘shadows’ of the past by exploring the processes of (re-)production, transmission and (re)interpretation of local, national and pan-European political heritage and experience. To this end, we sought to understand the attitudes noted above, as well as young people’s views on legitimate (and non-legitimate) forms of political representation and action within the context of different democratic heritages. In analysing the data, we aimed to identify clusters of similar experience, as well as contrasts, and map these in relation to theoretical explanations of political socialisation and memory transmission.

Thirdly, we sought to understand the potential appeal of radical, extreme or populist movements to young people and its relationship to regional, national and European political heritage. We explored this not only through a linear and explicit set of attitudinal questions in the questionnaire survey, but also as manifest in the motivations and practices of young people’s activism encountered through ethnographic fieldwork. Our analytical approach was informed by the argument that ‘the appeal’ of populism is more widespread and more complex than implied in the ‘normal pathology’ model (Mudde 2007: 297)—a proposition that we could test directly, given we collected data on receptivity to such ideologies (via the survey questionnaire) from locally representative samples of young people through to activists in patriotic and radical right movements (via ethnographic case studies).

Methodology for the Real World: Planning, Juggling and Compromising

The MYPLACE consortium was composed of national teams based in 14 European countries, each country-based research team being responsible for addressing the common research questions using data they themselves collected and analysed. A common methodology was used in each participant country and scheduled to take place within a common time frame. The project began with a single scoping phase, which informed the subsequent four major empirical elements: survey, follow-up interviews, ethnographies, and inter-generational interviews.

In this initial phase, the groundwork was laid for selecting the research locations for survey and follow-up interviews, identifying ethnographic case studies and establishing collaboration with the museums. As part of this, each team undertook a series of interviews and focus groups in order to establish national perspectives and issues. These data were collected using a bottom-up approach, in order to identify the contextually relevant issues and themes. The data were subsequently analysed using a common, consortium-wide ‘coding tree’, in order to draw out common themes across countries. By the end of this phase of work, we were in a position to finalise research locations for the questionnaire survey and interviews, determine an agreed list of ethnographic case studies and commence work with our museum partners.

The research was organised according to specific timed sequences of data collection, and flows of information and analyses from one empirical enterprise to another. The questionnaire survey and follow-up interviews were conducted sequentially, for example, but in parallel with the ethnographies and inter-generational interviews. The research was designed such that each of the four empirical elements could stand alone in analytic terms but provided the opportunity to undertake a more ambitious holistic analysis through their integration.

The research design involved the following sequenced steps:

• selecting research locations in each participant country to be used as fieldwork sites for the survey and interviews;
• conducting interviews and focus groups with young people in each of the fieldwork sites to identify salient issues to be included in the data collection instruments;
• undertaking interviews with academic and policy ‘experts’ in each country to identify relevant national, alongside regional and European, policy issues and responses (such as youth political disengagement and youth radicalisation);
• identifying and conducting three ethnographic case studies of youth activism in each country, to be analysed comparatively as thematic clusters across the 14 countries;
• developing a common structured survey questionnaire translated into the languages required in each location and rolled out in each of the 30 locations (n = 600 in each location);
• developing a common semi-structured interview scenario, adapting it to local contexts in relevant languages and conducting follow-up interviews with a sub-sample of the survey population (n = 30 in each location);
• identifying and collaborating with a museum (or other relevant non-governmental organisation) in order to conduct ethnographic studies, focus groups and expert interviews concerning the processes of (re-)production, transmission and (re)interpretation of local, national and pan-European political heritage and experience.

Locating the Research

The siting of the research in defined sub-national geographic locations is one of the innovations of the MYPLACE project. Each partner country selected two contrasting locations, although Germany required four, based on criteria designed to identify one location with a high propensity for youth receptivity to radical political agendas, and a second location where such propensity was low. There was no single set of criteria applied in all countries but nine potentially important criteria were delineated based on a prior analysis of literature, socio-demographic indicators, and national and local factors associated with young people’s receptivity to radical ideologies. National teams decided which criteria to use and the relative weight to be given to each. A detailed discussion of this methodology can be found in Chap. 2 of this volume and the locations selected are listed and described at the front of the book.

Developing the Questionnaire

The questionnaire survey was developed in English by the consortium. It borrowed certain elements from existing surveys for benchmarking purposes but, in large part, was designed specifically to address the MYPLACE research questions. While a number of nationally specific questions were included—often relating to important historical events, such as the war in Croatia in the 1990s, or current events, such as the financial crises in Greece, Portugal and Spain—most of the questionnaire was common to all partners.

The questionnaire development journey benefited from a broad range of inputs from researchers in all of the partner countries. The challenge was to produce a common instrument that would be acceptable to all teams and which would collect comparable data in all locations. In the design phase, concerns voiced over some issues reinforced ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Thinking Globally, Understanding Locally
• 1. Context-Sensitive Survey Research
• 2. Beyond Comparison? Transnational Qualitative Research
• 3. Triangulation in Practice
• Backmatter