Youth Values and Transitions: longitudinal insights Janet Holland

Youth Values and Transitions: longitudinal insights

Janet Holland


Today I will

• describe the study at the core of my thinking on the subject• talk about youth values, particularly in the context of youth and childhood

studies • changing context of youth transitions • introduce the theories that have guided the research • methods, talk a little about qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) • theories we have generated from the study

• case study of one young woman to illustrate all the issues I have raised.


• shifted from values, to adulthood, to social capital • agency and the ‘reflexive project of self’ • values and the construction of adult identity • how the social and material environment in which young

people grow to adulthood acts to shape the values and identities that they adopt


• Youth Values, we used questionnaires to 1800 young people across the five sites, followed by focus groups (56) and individual interviews (54), with volunteers from the questionnaire sample

• The sites are: a leafy commuter town (largely middle class and white; an inner city site (working class and ethnically diverse); a disadvantaged estate in the North West of England (working class and white); an isolated rural area (mixed social class - professionals, rural labourers, farmers) and a city in Northern Ireland (communities mixed re social class and religion)

• who and what formed the basis of their value systems, whom did they respect, and what kind of adults did they aspire to be?


• Inventing Adulthoods, dedicated biographical approach with 118 young people across the sites

• repeat biographical interviews, memory books and lifelines

• Youth Transitions. We continue the biographical interviews focusing on families, communities and social capital as part of a large programme of research with the Families and Social Capital ESRC Research Group.


• cross-cut analysis, we use computer aided analysis of all of the cases at one particular point in time, a synchronic analysis.

• narrative analysis, we take account of individual biographical narratives through time, a diachronic analysis

Inventing Adulthoods

1996 - 1999 Youth values: Identity, diversity and social change

Questionnaire n=1800Focus Groups n= 561:1 interviews n= 53

1999 - 2002 Inventing adulthoods: Young people’s strategies for transition.

Three in-depth 1:1 biographical interviews at 9 monthly intervals n=301Timelines, memory books

2002 - 2006 Youth transitions Two in-depth interviews, 18 months apart

2004

2005-2006

QLS Feasibility Study

Making the long view: Archiving, representing and sharing a QL resource

Peer consultation, questionnaires, meetingsConstructing an archive of Inventing Adulthoods

Discussion of youth values

"The young people of today love luxury. They have bad manners, they scoff at authority and lack respect for their elders. Children nowadays are real tyrants....they contradict their parents, ... eat gluttonously and tyrannise their teachers."

‘Public understanding of young people’s lives is in terms of the spectacular – drug and/or alcohol-crazed, violent or criminal (more often than not all three), as obese, molly-coddled stay-at-homes, or as idlers who want to be famous without doing a day’s work’ (Henderson et al. 2006).

Youth Values

"the link between deprivation and juvenile crime, an interest in the distinctive forms of juvenile youth culture, the gang, the deviant subculture. Youth becomes boys, the wild boys, the male working class adolescent out for blood and giggles: youth-as-trouble, youth-in-trouble" (Hebdige, 1982).

Youth Values

Yeah and how do you think adults see young people? Belinda: As pests (laughs and so does the interviewer).Belinda: As a nuisance. I think the older people, they do. And the other - it's like on

my estate, the ones that are a bit older than us, they were all tearaways, they were all a lot of trouble. So everyone looked at them as scum and, you know, just they walked past and you'd think, ‘There goes trouble,’ or something like that. And (pause) not so much me because I knew the backgrounds they come from. And although they were on drugs and they were doing things, it was because they never had no guidance from their parents, they never had the love and things that I had, so they went down that road, 'cos they never had no one to show them the right way to go. So in a way it wasn't their fault, it was - they'd done what they had to do, sort of thing. And alright, they got mixed up with the wrong crowd but they had nowhere else to turn to.

Youth Values

• theories of moral development (Piaget 1965/1931; Kohlberg 1981-1984) and feminist critiques of these theories emphasising relationship and connectedness in processes of moral development (Gilligan 1982, Tronto 1993).

• the new sociology of childhood perspective, which sees children and young people as active in the construction of their own identity and world.

• theories of post- and high modernity, which suggest that this construction of self is taking place in a changing world epitomised by risk, uncertainty and the crumbling of traditional institutional supports

Youth Values

• They saw acquiring moral autonomy as closely aligned with the development of physical and emotional competence

• Polly: You’re responsible because you did it (laughs). I mean, if you knew how

to do it then you must know how to take responsibility for it – you must be able to ‘cos you knew how to do it – knew how to do the thing that was wrong [yw 16]

• Carol: Maybe they weren’t raised with the morals you know. But everybody knows, you’re brought up in society that you can’t kill, it’s not just young people…. But I dunno. Maybe they came from a broken home or something, but it’s still no excuse. (yw, 16)

Changing contexts changing transitions

Economic insecurity and risk are now imagined to be best addressed through individual resiliency and a capacity to change and adapt to a volatile educational and labour market. Individuals need to be prepared to return to education to re-skill themselves, to negotiate wages and conditions through private arrangements, to change career paths when necessary, to manage livelihoods without a ‘job for life’, and to take personal responsibility for their economic security. (Aapola et al. 2005:59)

Changing contexts changing transitions

• more extended: with economic independence deferred• more complex: there is no longer a conventional timetable,

dependence and independence may combine and critical moments make a difference

• more ‘risky’: involving backtracking, risk taking and parent/child conflict

• more individualised: young people have more choice but are not equally able to capitalise on it

• more polarised: with inequalities more sharply defined in relation to more elite ‘slow track’ transitions and more risky ‘fast track’ (Jones 2005)

Late modernity and the risk society

Giddens and Beck both• regard late modern society to be a risk society with high levels of insecurity and

uncertainty, but providing new choices and opportunities, and access to new and multiple information sources.

• see the changing balance of power between men and women and a redefinition of the relationship between men and women as significant in the processes of change in late modernity

• see the couple relationship as becoming more significant in these shifting sands • For Giddens (1992), it is the pure relationship, between equals, lasts for as long as

it works for them. • For Beck (1992) it is the loss of other meaningful relationships that can lead to

considerable weight being placed on the couple, which may not be able to meet the relational needs of the individual.

‘normal’ and ‘choice’ biographies

• Du Bois Reymond describes a ‘gender specific normal biography’ where young people ‘aim for a clearly defined profession and employment at an early stage and enter fixed relationships in order to start a family – or at least they intend to’ (1998:66). She contrasts this with a ‘non-gender specific choice biography’.

• When structural forces and personal resources, such as gender and social class, support one another, there is a tendency for the structural resources to take on an ‘invisible’ quality’ (Nilsen and Brannen 2002: 42).

• Walkerdine and her colleagues have another take on the continuing importance of social class, suggesting that the choice biography should also be understood in terms of self regulation, where ‘the most seductive aspect of self invention of all lies in the possibility of the working class remaking itself as middle class’ (2001: 121).

reworking the category class

Class retrieved in a culturalist analysis

• a shift in how class operates, and that ‘in various settings of social life, processes of inequality are produced and reproduced routinely and […] this involves both economic and cultural practices’ (Devine and Savage 2000: 196).

• ‘while collective class identities are indeed weak, people continue to define

their own individual identities in ways which inevitably involve relational comparisons with members of various social classes’, so that class cultures are being reformed ‘around individualised axes’ (Savage 2000:xxii).


Class retrieved in a cultural and psychosocial analysis

• ‘class is produced in a complex dynamic between classes, with each class being the other’s ‘Other’’ (2005: 923). Emotional and psychic dimensions need to be taken into account, a psychic economy of social class (Reay, 2005:911).

• The production of subjects from all classes and the way in which they live their

subjectification centrally involves a constant invitation to consume, to invent, to choose, and yet even in the midst of their choice and their consumption class is performed, written all over their every choice. …And…the living out of these marks of difference is filled with desire, longing, anxiety, pain, defence. Class is at once profoundly social and profoundly emotional and lived in its specificity

in particular cultural and geographical locations. (Walkerdine et al. 2001)


Class deployed as a legitimising category in the hands of the dominantRepresentation of the working class by the dominant:• …as underclass, as white blockage to modernity and global prosperity, as

irresponsible selves to blame for structural inequality, … as lacking in agency and culture, whilst the middle-classes are represented as at the vanguard of the modern, as a national identity and cultural resource ( Skeggs 2004: 94)

• Walkerdine (1996) argues that that traditional sociological understandings of class in terms of occupational or economic status, also serve to reinforce dominant discourses around mobility and merit.

• Gillies suggests that theories of the reflexive, late modern agent have permeated the social landscape, generating a new language to explain personal experience and social relationships, and shaping governing politics in the UK. They bring a stated aim of redistributing possibilities as opposed to wealth. (Italics added, 2005: 837).

New economy

• changes leading to the ‘new economy’ include de-industrialisation, an increase in the service sector in the economy, and flexibilisation

• Employees need to be sufficiently flexible, technically equipped and well trained to be able to adapt throughout their professional life to different tasks, contexts and requirements (Castells 2000).

• It is argued that this ‘new economy’ is becoming increasingly more virtual, reflexive, flexible and networked.

• ‘economic postmodernisation’ has led to the new economy being characterised by data, knowledge and service intensity (Hardt 1999, Castells 1996, Thrift 1998, Lury 2003, Adkins 2005a.).

New economy

• erosion of the distinction between the public and the private spheres. A contributory feature is increasing female participation in the labour market, which has led to the inclusion in the public world of work of attributes and activities that were previously considered to be part of the private sphere, and the reverse.

• In the new globalised economy, what elite workers exchange on the employment market is based on gender, identity work and reflexivity. Reflexivity is the ability to reflect upon and change one’s practice as appropriate.

New economy, remaking of class, race and gender

• not all reflexive identities are seen as equally valuable or desirable and old forms of inequality such as class, gender and race are being remade in new ways. For Skeggs it is only the white middle classes who are assumed to ‘have’ a self that can become a project, and ‘reflexivity’ – a self conscious conversation of self with self, has more or less value according to who performs it Skeggs (2004)

• in the new economy the accumulation of information replaces the accumulation of capital, with a reworking of power and property as largely informational (Adkins 2005a). Axes of difference are reworked in relation to access to and exclusion from information flows, with implications relating to class, gender and race (Adkins 2005b).

new sociology of work to explain the new economy

• there are blurred and shifting boundaries between different forms of work: public and private, paid and unpaid, formal and informal;

• work is embedded in other social relations; • orientations to work are shaped by gender, class and culture;• it is increasingly important to understand work on the margins of public spaces

(Taylor et al. 2003). • Glucksman (2003) adds to this conceptualisation, stressing the significance of

connections between different work activities• interconnections between work activities across the economic processes of

production, distribution, exchange and consumption. • connectedness between work activities in different spheres, and crucially how

boundaries between what is work and what is not can change

An interjection on method: qualitative longitudinal investigation

• At the core are the principles of qualitative investigation in general, an interest in understanding the meaning of the experiences of social actors in their social context, both for the actors, and through an analytic and interpretative process for the researcher.

• Qualitative research can produce high quality, in-depth data, and great explanatory value. It can offer an understanding of causality, how and why things happen as they do, how aspects of social, cultural and contextual processes interact to produce different individual outcomes (Thomson, Henderson and Holland 2003).

• Qualitative research generates theory, although it can also be used to investigate hypotheses

• Qualitative longitudinal research brings the additional dimension of time, process and change to the centre of the research process and knowledge generated

• The method raises many issues: handling the vast amount of data generated; lack of closure - interpretations can always be disrupted by the next round of data; ethics; confidentiality; continuity of personnel and teams

Theories we generate

Critical moments

we used the term ‘critical moments’ to describe events in young people’s lives that either they or we the researchers or perhaps both, considered to be highly consequential.

The approach draws attention to the importance of timing, the configuration of events, and the resources and resourcefulness of young people’s responses to these events

Theories we generate

examples of critical moments

family related situations, moving (house, school, town, country); illness and bereavement; events associated with the education system both formal (exams, changing schools) and informal (bullying, relationship with teachers).

Rites of passage identified included ‘coming out’ as lesbian or gay, passing a driving test and discovering or rediscovering religion.

Relationships were an enduring source of critical moments

leisure

domestic

work

education

relationship

self

citizenship

A case study: Maisie

Int: Well do you think you've got more networks than people you know?

Maisie: I think it's just because I've got so many jobs, and I've had so many jobs, you know. (Int: Yeah.)

Maisie: Because I've got friends at (sports club where she works part-time), I've got friends at my new job, I've got friends that I know from the (hotel where she worked), I've got friends from College, from school, from uni - I don't know, it's just like a bit (.) All these like little groups.

Int: Yeah but the ones that you spend the most time with are the ones at uni? Maisie: Yeah because I'm there at university. But people have always said to me,

"When you go to university you'll meet friends who will be your friends for your life," and they probably are true.


Maisie: Well I'm like independent and everything 'cos I don’t really need them. But I think I have to do a lot, and I just think - not that I moan about having to do these things - but I just think that when I look at some of the other girls at uni and they just seem to like just can just do what they want. And before I can just do what I want in the day I have to like make sure that everybody else is OK. Like with my Mum being ill in hospital, that's been hard because - and like shop - things like you have to do the shopping and just pay the bills, you know, just simple things like that, but it takes up….

And like I just feel it's just hard that, trying to fit everything in.


Maisie: I think like going to university I think has like made me grow up. 'Cos like you've just got up and you're in like a different environment and stuff, aren't you? And meeting new people has like made me grown up. And like my Mum being ill makes you a bit more independent - but I think I was always like independent anyway, like looking after myself.

Int: Would you say there's any particular moment in time, or any particular sort of thing that happened?

Maisie: Yeah I think breaking up with him, like when we parted, was like made me change a lot. 'Cos when he broke up - when we broke up I just felt like that was it. I've gotta get back on - like go out and get myself a job and like start seeing all my friends again


Maisie: … and what she was saying to me, where it was like seemed quite good like, was it being a 24 hour company, I could like - I wouldn't mind like going to uni, coming home at like half six/seven and like starting at (retail outlet) at like eleven o'clock at night… . Or like - or even coming home for a sleep and have some tea, start at eleven o'clock at night and working till seven in the morning. Then I could go home and have a few hours' sleep and I've got all day to do my uni work. Or I could do like a six - two, and I'd still have all day to do my uni work. Because even when I'm not in uni I get up at six anyway, because you know when you just do? I don’t really mind not sleeping at all.


Int: Yeah so it's only the rich kids who can afford to go to hall at (her university)?

Maisie: I think in all universities.Int: Yeah.Maisie: But some people - not everyone - but you have to really

struggle. And it's a shame because it's like they make it so hard for you to go.

Int: Yeah.Maisie: Really hard, and I just really think - but I don’t think normal

people are supposed to go to university, the way they work it out.


Maisie: And I do wish that I had more money and that my Mum and Dad was rich, 'cos then I wouldn't have to actually go to work, you know, to get money. Well I would, but I wouldn't have to go to work as much would I?

Maisie: Not - not like I don’t hate like my family or like living at home, but I just hate this hole. I've always said - well I always say now that I wanna go to university and everything and like get a job, but when I get a job I'll never live in (estate) ever, 'cos I just think it's a bad place to live, I think it's full of idiots.


It is not what she wants: Maisie: But then I just laugh because that is what I just don’t want in my life. I will

- when I'm the one that's got a nice job with like loads of money and a nice car and don’t live round here, I'll be the happy one won't I, not them little scallies on the dole? (laughs) … And like I'm not saying that it's that bad around here. But I don’t know if you understand what I mean, it's just like I just don’t want that, I just really don’t want that. And it's just not anything that I'd ever want.

And what she does want: Maisie: And I really would like to go to university, have a bit of fun when I leave,

go away working, but at the end of the day when I grow up I want to have like a nice job, you know, and have a nice house and like a nice family with children and a husband and a nice car and like, you know, just to have a nice life.

Documents

Youth Values and Transitions: longitudinal insights Janet Holland