Researching Young People′s Lives
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Researching Young People′s Lives

Sue Heath, Rachel Brooks, Elizabeth Cleaver, Eleanor Ireland

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eBook - ePub

Researching Young People′s Lives

Sue Heath, Rachel Brooks, Elizabeth Cleaver, Eleanor Ireland

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About This Book

? Researching young people?s lives will be useful to both the novice researcher and anyone interested in learning about new methods of practice? - Youth Studies Australia

Researching Young People?s Lives provides an overview of some of the key methodological challenges facing youth researchers and an introduction to the broad repertoire of methods used in youth-orientated research.

The book is split into two sections. In the first half of the book, the authors consider the broad methodological and contextual concerns of relevance to the design and conduct of youth research, including ethical issues, the importance of context, and the rise of participatory approaches to youth research. The second part of the book focuses on the use of specific research methods in the conduct of youth research, ranging from surveys and secondary analysis through to interviewing, ethnography, visual methods, and the use of the internet in youth research. Throughout the book, the emphasis is on research in practice, and examples are drawn from recent youth research projects from a wide range of disciplines and substantive areas, and from a range of both UK and non-UK contexts.

This is an ideal introduction to the field for novice researchers, in particular students studying and researching in the broad area of youth studies. It should also appeal to practitioners engaged in evaluation of service provision to young people, and to established youth researchers who might wish to explore the potential of using a different set of methods to those with which they are already familiar.

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1

Researching Young People’s Lives: An Introduction

Young people’s lives are a source of curiosity and intrigue within contemporary societies, as indeed they have been for a very long time. Open any newspaper and you will encounter any number of familiar and regularly recycled storylines relating to ‘the youth of today’: be it the nation’s latest ‘youngest mum’, the brave young survivor of cancer, the one-person juvenile crime wave, the youthful academic prodigy, the teenaged sporting hero … the list goes on. Taken as a measure of what society might look like in the future as successive cohorts reach adulthood, the attitudes and experiences of younger generations are constantly picked over and subjected to close scrutiny, with regular pronouncements then made about both the current state of the nation and its prospects for the years ahead. Following the spate of teenage shootings in London in early 2007, for example, the leader of the UK Conservative Party, David Cameron, proclaimed, ‘That’s what our society’s now come to: teenagers shooting other teenagers in their homes at point-blank range. I think what we need is to recognise our society is badly broken and we need to make some big changes, starting now’ (Owen, 2007). Young people’s lives are then frequently held up as a ‘social barometer’ of wider societal change (Jones and Wallace, 1992), whether for good or ill, and as such are constantly in the spotlight.
Social researchers are by no means exempt from this fascination with young people’s lives. Over the last 100 years, social scientists from a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds have attempted to explain society’s fascination with youth as a life stage, have provided detailed descriptive accounts of different facets of young people’s lives and have advanced various theoretical frameworks for understanding their experiences. Key to these processes has been the development and implementation of effective strategies for researching youth. Given the scale of this endeavour, there are surprisingly few current textbooks which focus exclusively on the specific methodological challenges of conducting youth research. McLeod and Malone (2000) and Bennett et al. (2003) are notable exceptions, both entitled Researching Youth and both providing fascinating insider accounts of issues of method arising from specific examples of youth research. Other books in this field, though, have tended to conflate the challenges of youth research with those of childhood research (e.g., Fraser et al., 2003; Kellett et al., 2003; Best, 2007). Amy Best’s edited collection Representing Youth: Methodological Issues in Critical Youth Studies, for example, is an important and valuable contribution to the field, yet the book includes as many chapters on research with young children as it does on youth research. Best justifies this coverage on the basis of the degree of commonality between childhood and youth research. We would not deny that there are indeed important areas of methodological overlap between the two traditions, nor that youth researchers and childhood researchers might not have much to learn from each other. Nonetheless, as we argue below, we still want to insist on the distinctiveness of youth research, not just because of its distinct histories, theoretical perspectives, methods and key literatures, but also due to what we believe to be young people’s distinctive position within society relative to all other groups – including relative to children.
In this book we seek to make a contribution to filling this void by presenting an overview of some of the key methodological challenges associated specifically with researching young people’s lives and by providing an introduction to a broad repertoire of methods which are particularly well suited to youth-orientated research. Our book is targeted primarily at novice researchers, in particular students studying and researching in the broad area of youth studies, including those pursuing specialist youth studies-related degree programmes and youth work qualifications, as well as students opting for individual youth-related units of study or conducting youth-related dissertations within broader social science degree programmes. We hope that it will also appeal to practitioners engaged in the evaluation of service provision to young people, as well as to established youth researchers who might wish to explore the potential of using a different set of methods to those with which they are already familiar. Throughout the book we place an emphasis on research in practice, drawing on examples of recent youth research from a wide range of disciplines and substantive areas, and from a range of both UK and non-UK contexts.
A book of this kind is timely given that recent years have seen a rekindled interest in the academic study of young people’s lives. In part, this has been spurred on by a renewal of theoretical debate within youth studies, concerning issues as diverse as the ongoing relevance or otherwise of subcultural theory, the validity of the individualisation thesis in understanding young people’s lives in late modernity, the extent to which certain risk behaviours have been ‘normalised’ amongst contemporary youth and the increasingly blurred boundaries between youth and adulthood. In the UK context, this rekindling of interest has also been fuelled by New Labour’s focus over the last decade on youth intervention strategies as a key tool for tackling social exclusion and promoting wider social inclusion. Strategies such as Connexions, the New Deal for Young People, and policies such as those which seek to reduce teenage pregnancy rates or to lower the incidence of various forms of anti-social behaviour have all generated considerable interest amongst youth researchers, and have provided many opportunities for both official and unofficial policy evaluation.
In parallel with this resurgence of substantive and theoretical interest within youth studies, there has also been a renewed interest in the specific methods by which young people’s lives can be researched, as well as a broadening of the range of methods now commonly used by youth researchers. Whilst tried and tested methods such as interviews and surveys remain widely used, there is also a much greater willingness amongst youth researchers to draw on a more diverse repertoire of methods of data collection and approaches to analysis, not least those made possible by advances in new technologies. This broadened repertoire includes, then, the use of visual approaches, such as photo elicitation, spatial mapping techniques and video diaries (often used within broader ethnographic studies); ‘mobile methods’, such as research ‘walkabouts’; internet-based methods, such as web surveys, email interviewing, and discourse and conversation analysis of website/chat room content; participatory and peer-led approaches to youth research; the growing use of narrative and biographical interviewing and techniques of analysis; longitudinal qualitative approaches and the re-use of existing qualitative data; and a developing interest in comparative methods. Whilst methods and approaches such as these are by no means unique to researching the experiences of young people, we argue that their deployment within the context of youth research does nonetheless raise a wide range of methodological issues which are specific to researching young people as opposed to other groups, not least because of the very specific contexts within which much youth research is conducted. Our book then is timely in reflecting upon the applicability to youth research of more general methodological developments within the social sciences.
A crucial issue in making the case for the distinctiveness of youth research relates to our working definition of this life stage and the degree to which it is possible to draw a clear distinction between childhood and youth on the one hand, and youth and adulthood on the other. Many social scientists argue – as we do – that each of these life stages is both a culturally- and historically-specific construction. Some argue for the existence of a new life stage between childhood and youth populated by a group popularly referred to as ‘the tweenies’, and there is strong evidence for the parallel emergence of ‘young adulthood’ as a distinct new life stage between youth and adulthood (e.g., Heath and Cleaver, 2003; Arnett, 2004). Most social scientists would almost certainly point to the difficulties of aligning these different life stages with specific age-based boundaries. Nonetheless, in our view it remains important to distinguish between these different life stages wherever possible – not least because young people themselves tend to be acutely aware of these distinctions and of the extension or withdrawal of the rights and privileges which attend them. In practical terms, then, this book sets out to focus on issues which are broadly relevant to the conduct of research with young people in their mid-teens to mid-twenties, although these boundaries should by no means be seen as fixed nor impermeable. Incidentally, such a focus is broadly in line with the United Nation’s definition of youth in terms of those aged 15 to 24 years old. When we draw comparisons throughout the book with research on children, we are generally referring to research involving individuals younger than this specific age group.
We acknowledge that this nonetheless represents a broad age grouping, and that a 15 year old and a 24 year old might have very little in common beyond the label of ‘youth’. However, in the context of ongoing debates concerning the consequences of ‘delayed’ transitions to adulthood, the lives of many young people in their early to mid-twenties remain characterised by a relative freedom from many of the traditional markers of ‘adult’ status, such as permanent employment, settling down with a long-term partner, parenthood and independent housing arrangements. Some writers claim further that many twenty-somethings deliberately seek to distance themselves from the concept of adulthood and instead cling to the distinctiveness of youth (du Bois-Reymond, 1998; Côté, 2000; Arnett, 2004).

The distinctiveness of youth research

In certain respects, many of the methodological issues and choices facing youth researchers are no different from those facing any group of social researchers. All researchers have to grapple with the challenges of gaining access, selecting an appropriate sample, choosing the most appropriate research method, and working out how best to analyse their research data. However, there are a number of features which are unique to the conduct of youth research as opposed to other forms of research – including childhood research – and which in combination create a case for the distinctiveness of youth research. This section explores four key contextual factors. First, young people’s lives are structured by a range of age-specific contexts and institutions, such as educational institutions, training programmes, and leisure activities and subcultures targeted specifically at young people. Second, their lives are framed by age-specific policies, such as an age-regulated social security regime and various other government initiatives which target specific age groups. Third, youth is constructed as a critical time of transition and individual development within the life course, and as such there is widespread societal concern with the monitoring of young people’s lives. Finally, and by no means of least importance, young people are a relatively powerless group within the research process for reasons which are often specific to their life phase, and which therefore necessitate particular attention during the research process. Each of these factors has important implications for the specific nature of youth research as opposed to other forms of research, and we consider each in turn.

The age-specific institutional and spatial contexts of young people’s lives

Young people experience many aspects of their lives in highly age-segregated contexts, contexts which separate them out from other age groups. This is a feature of the ‘institutionalisation’ of the lives of different age groups, whereby individuals spend large amounts of time in age-structured institutions which serve to reinforce distinctions between those different age groups, and which often construct young people as marginal to ‘adult’ concerns. Educational institutions such as schools and colleges, for instance, are central to the lives of many young people, with chronological age being a key organisational feature. Students typically progress through educational institutions according to increasing age rather than achievement per se, whilst privileges such as the relaxation of strict uniform codes or access to common room space are also often attached to increasing age. With the rapid expansion of higher education amongst young people over the last 15 years or so, many universities and colleges of higher education have also become more homogeneous in terms of age than perhaps used to be the case.
Outside of these formal institutions, young people may spend large amounts of their time in leisure sites which, whether intentionally or by default, are also structured by age, such as youth clubs, student pubs and nightclubs. They may participate in junior leagues of sports clubs, play in youth orchestras, read books and magazines targeted specifically at young people, sign up to youth-dominated social networking websites such as MySpace, holiday with companies such as Club 18–30, participate in the youth organisations of various religious groups, take part in age-specific developmental activities such as the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme or the Millennium Volunteers, seek advice from age-specific one-stop-shops, and join age-specific organised groups such as the Venture Scouts or the Air Cadets, or the youth sections of political parties and pressure groups. The living arrangements of young people who have left the parental home may also be marked by a high degree of age homogeneity, whether living in halls of residence, peer shared households, local authority care homes, foyers, hostels, young offenders’ institutions or military barracks.
Young people, then, spend very large amounts of time with other young people, and often develop a stronger allegiance to their peer groups than to more age-diverse social groupings. Children’s lives are of course also strongly shaped by their involvement in age-specific institutions, but child-centred institutions tend to segregate them from most of the institutions referred to above: in other words, children and young people tend not to occupy the same institutional spaces. Even within secondary schools, which have the greatest potential for the blurring of divisions between different age groups, pupils spend most of their time corralled into classroom spaces according to their specific age. Not only do child-centred institutions and spaces tend to be distinct from those serving older groups, children also spend far more of their time under the direct supervision of adults, whether those adults are professionals of various kinds or family members. In all of these ways, age differences are constantly reinforced, and often by young people themselves.

The policy contexts of young people’s lives

Young people’s lives are also circumscribed by age-specific policies and laws which mark them out as belonging to a separate category of the population to both adults and children and which serve to legitimate their differential treatment. As Mizen has noted, ‘the simple fact of possessing a certain biological age brings with it differential access to social power, while age also provides the means through which young people are brought into a more or less common relationship with many of the central institutions of modern life’ (2003: 9). Their status as ‘not yet adult’ is strongly linked to the widespread view that young people are ‘citizens in the making’ and as such do not deserve equal treatment in policy terms. For example, the UK’s social security system does not treat most young people as fully adult, and hence eligible for higher rates of benefit, until the age of 25. Similarly, minimum wage legislation is not universally applied to all young workers, but is based on distinctions between different groups of workers according to age. Connexions has been targeted at young people aged 13 to 19, whilst government training schemes such as Apprenticeships and the New Deal for Young People are targeted at those aged 16 to 24 and 18 to 24 respectively.
Furthermore, young people in their mid-to-late teens are specifically targeted by various government initiatives aimed at tackling social exclusion ‘in the bud’, including anti-truancy measures, measures to tackle school exclusions, and policies targeted at reducing teenage pregnancies. More generally, age-related legislation with respect to the attainment of various rights and responsibilities is also complex, with young people treated as adults for different purposes at different ages. For example, in the UK a young person is allowed to work part-time at 13, can enter a public house but not drink alcohol at 14, is legally permitted to drink alcohol and have sex at 16, can go to war and obtain a licence to drive most vehicles at 17, can vote, buy cigarettes and tobacco, buy alcohol in a bar and get a tattoo at 18, and can stand for election to Parliament at 21. The lives of young people in their mid-teens to mid-twenties are, then, arguably subject to far greater levels of state regulation and control than the lives of younger children – and possibly the lives of older groups, too.

The monitoring of youth transitions

The degree to which young people’s lives are circumscribed by age-specific policies is not unrelated to broader societal concerns regarding the need to monitor their transitions to adulthood. Youth is constructed both in popular and in much academic discourse as a key period of transition and change, marked by individual development from the status of ‘child’, through ‘youth’, and onwards towards ‘adulthood’. As a buffer zone between childhood and adulthood, youth as a life stage has taken on a special status, as a time when young people are regarded as being particularly vulnerable to risk-taking and negative influences. Developmental psychologists often characterise this phase as being marked by ‘storm and stress’ and various manifestations of more or less acceptable experimentation, representing what Erik Erikson famously referred to as the ‘psychosocial moratorium’ of adolescence. As such, young people are deemed to require special guidance and protection from adults, on the back of which a vast industry of youth intervention agencies has emerged over the years: educational and developmental psychologists, careers advisers...

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