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In recent years a plethora of arts-based projects and interventions targeting marginalised children and young people have emerged a number of which have focussed specifically on music-making. Resulting research has often highlighted the social, psychological and emotional benefits involved although few studies have explored the connections between music-making and mentoring with young people in educational contexts. This paper comprises a small-scale, qualitative study of one such intervention in a secondary school in the South of England. Analysis of transcripts from one-to-one interviews with participants (pupils) aged 11-17 years reveals various ways in which music-making facilitated positive change such as increased confidence, improved attitudes towards teachers and peers, feelings of calm, and better communication skills. The paper concludes by suggesting that music-making activity may confer significant psycho-social benefits for young people, particularly when combined with mentoring support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to study place dynamics in relationships between academically-oriented young people and their local rural places. With point of departure in rural settings with less obvious flagship attractions and cultural assets compared to urban high amenity settings, the paper contributes to the limited literature on the perception of place among academically-oriented youth, who in future potentially belong to the professional category of knowledge workers. Addressing identity, place and the concept of cool in relation to rural youth, we analyse the findings from 23 qualitative, in-depth interviews conducted with 49 young people in secondary education in two rural regions of Denmark to identify place dynamics in the relationships between these young people and their local places. The paper adds to the youth literature by demonstrating how rural youth produce, articulate and maintain identities and visions for desired futures with aspirations for urban lifestyles. Findings show that the interviewed youth's relationships to their local rural place are characterised by conflicting feelings of attachment, detachment, pride and entrapment, and that such feelings reflect on identity construction and seem to play an important role for future migration intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive research has shown that working-class young people often struggle in school. There has been a lack of research that explores young people's institutional experiences of education and support outside of the school context, however. This paper presents some of the findings from a qualitative study with 10 young people in Scotland, which addresses this gap by exploring young people's experiences of support and education beyond the school gates. It found that the participants had troublingly negative and strikingly unproductive school careers, and instead accessed support and education in one or two settings: through youth work and/or college-based further education. The more individually tailored and informal nature of these institutions, combined with what was widely felt to be a more relaxed and personal relationship dynamic between staff and young people, were highly valued by the participants, all of whom began to make concrete progress towards forming or achieving their aspirations in these settings, often for the first time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a five-year qualitative study on the impacts of the Olympic Games on homeless and marginally housed youth in two host cities (Vancouver 2010 and London 2012), this paper explores the instances of ‘symbolic violence’ perpetuated by the institutional infrastructure associated with the Olympics. Following Pierre Bourdieu’s use of the term, symbolic violence refers to the manner in which the young people turned dominant notions of what the desirable Olympic city looks and feels like into a sense of their own non-belonging and/or inadequacy, experienced bodily and emotionally. Feeling pressured to vie for elusive Olympic jobs and volunteer positions, and to be less visible to the thousands of tourist-spectators for the Games, youth in both cities reported a defiant mix of frustrated indignation and resigned acceptance that they did not ‘fit’ the image of the global Olympic city that organizers were trying to convey. The paper argues that this social harm, difficult to measure yet real nonetheless, is an important though unintended legacy of the Olympic Games for homeless and marginally housed youth living in its shadows. The paper also calls for a more sustained engagement with Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence in youth studies as a discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Framed within a life-course perspective, this paper analyses the contents of the phenomenon 'maturing out' of adolescent drinking. We identify five dimensions of change that young adults' drinking habits are expected to undergo when they reach their mid-twenties: using alcohol to maintain and develop existing relationships instead of building new relationships; drinking in differentiated ways instead of always to get drunk; controlling one's intoxication instead of transgressing limits; considering the day after drinking instead of 'living for the night'; and drinking to 'chill' and not to 'cope'. Maturing out, as described by our interviewees, is only loosely connected with the taking on of adult roles and responsibilities (related to e.g. work and family). Rather, maturing out is a powerful social norm urging young adults to change their drinking habits, regardless of their individual life situation – a status-forcing mechanism casting those who do not adapt as deviants. The analysis centres on 24 qualitative interviews with Danish 25–27-year-olds identified as 'heavy drinkers' in a preceding population survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we draw upon a narrative inquiry alongside urban Aboriginal youth and their families in western Canada; the overall goal of our inquiry was to understand their educational and schooling experiences. Shifting our focus from schools as the only place where curriculum is made, we draw on the conceptualization of children, youth, and families as also engaged as curriculum makers in homes and in communities and in the in-between places of homes and schools. In this paper we explore the multiple curriculum-making worlds of Lane and Donovan, two Aboriginal youth. As part of understanding the multiple worlds and relationships between, and intersections of, multiple worlds, we draw on Lugones' concept of world traveling. We contemplate the importance of understanding lives over time, in geographic places, and social contexts. We wonder how the worlds youth inhabit are shaped by institutional, social, political, and institutional stories, and how these larger narratives shape the ways in which we attend to the lives of youth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Debates abound about low levels of engagement in mainstream civic life on the part of young Muslims from immigrant backgrounds living in non-Muslim majority countries. This paper investigates the emergent types of civic practice enacted by first or second generation Australian youth of major Muslim migrant communities, and suggests that in order to better understand the commonly identified problem of low levels of civic participation amongst this group it is necessary to situate the debate in broader conceptual frameworks regarding the shift towards ‘do-it-yourself’ citizenship on the part of the current generation. The paper argues for a focus on practices of youth cultural production and consumption, civic networks in everyday spaces, and work on the self as new forms of civic engagement, drawing on qualitative research with 80 young Muslims, who are outside both radical and mainstream formal associational practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on findings from a two-year in-depth qualitative study conducted in three rural areas in Uganda, this paper describes the ‘systematic structuring of vulnerability’ arising from young women's experiences of economic insecurity, and the impact this has on sexual decision-making and practices. It describes economic insecurity within young people's households, perceived gaps in parental provision for young women's basic needs, and the restrictions experienced by young women and men when trying to generate their own income. By examining the links between these experiences of economic vulnerability and young people's sexual decision-making and practices, this paper offers important pointers to the development of future approaches to sexual health programming which incorporate strategies to enhance young people's independent income generation opportunities and reduce their experiences of economic insecurity at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The numbers of children under the age of 18 being incarcerated in England and Wales has decreased of late, with official figures indicating that the current population of just over 1500 has halved during the last decade. But levels of reoffending among children released from prison remain the highest, with three out of four young people being reconvicted within one year of release from juvenile custody. Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of community-based sports projects target children and young people, when it comes to incarcerated populations, sporting initiatives are less prevalent. Where sport has become well established as a useful social cohesion/inclusion strategy in community settings, some of these approaches have been translated into custodial settings. Resulting research has often proclaimed sporting pursuits as a modern-day panacea in terms of their social, psychological and emotional benefits, yet few studies have explored the nuances of sports-based interventions within secure settings. This paper comprises a small-scale, qualitative study of one such intervention in a Young Offender Institution in the South of England. Placing respondent accounts at the centre of the analysis, the paper sheds light on the practicalities of programme delivery by uncovering the motivating factors behind participant engagement whilst exploring broader notions of personal development. The paper concludes by highlighting that sport/physical activity can confer significant psychosocial benefits and promote the rehabilitation of young people leaving custody, particularly when integrated into wider programmes of support and provision. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the adolescent female perspective on women's participation as leaders in society. Using a qualitative approach, the study outlined in this paper investigated this phenomenon through the use of student focus groups. Participants were students in their final year of schooling from secondary girls' schools located in Australia, with one school located in South Africa. This study found that students identified the patriarchal nature of leadership positions, women's possible lack of desire to hold a leadership position, and the impact of gender stereotypes as concerns. However, students were mostly positive with regard to their ability to overcome these issues in the future. It is recommended through the findings of this study that girls are given voice through their formal schooling in order to discuss issues of gender and leadership, and as a consequence, an awareness of issues concerning gender inequity may be created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the findings from a project investigating the circumstances, experiences, perspectives and service needs of young people caring for a family member with a disability or long-term illness. Using qualitative methods, our research explored the experiences of two cohorts of young carers – younger carers aged 7 to 17 years and young adult carers aged 18 to 25 years. The concept of ‘bounded agency’ offers an explanation for the way that younger carers' and young adult carers' decisions and aspirations can be shaped by the barriers and contexts in which they find themselves. The study compares the impacts of caring on the participants' education, employment, health and social life. Important differences are identified, particularly relating to young adult carers' future aspirations as they approach key normative transitions into young adulthood. The paper concludes with implications for services and policy for young carers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the rejection of subcultural collectivity by postmodern scholars in the field of youth studies. The fluidity of neo-tribes does not fully reflect the lived experiences of many young people today whose subcultural being is neither transient nor irrelevant. Moving away from the notion of spectacular subcultures, this paper identifies cultural knowledge and creative engagement as significant factors in youth group affiliations. This inevitably causes problems for the researcher as such identifiers of subcultural belonging are almost impossible for an 'outsider' to appreciate. An attempt is made to incorporate the term subculture back into academic discourse whilst also investigating aspects of agency within hip-hop and grime cultures. Qualitative research was undertaken in five sites in and around the south-east of England. This work identified variations within a cultural form that is often homogenised by scholars. Distinctions are made between the relative passivity of consumers of youth culture, here termed 'peripherals', and those at the centre of their localised musical scenes. The 'purists', as they are identified in this paper, exert significant degrees of autonomy over their cultural participation and openly reject mainstream sensibilities in favour of claiming a sense of ownership and connection to their personalised variant of this globalised form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores normalised drug use as an aspect of young people's leisure careers. Qualitative data generated by 24 single-sex focus groups with 153 (85 males; 68 females) 15-16-year-olds attending seven schools in north-west England and north-east Wales revealed that young people's drug use tended to be both heterogeneous and situation specific. Indeed, rather than being actively sought out, 15-16-year-olds' drug use was often characterised by propinquity - either in terms of place (e.g. parties), relationships (in particular, friends and peers), similarities of outlook and style (e.g. engagement in drug-oriented leisure) and time (in the sense of age cohorts) - and by sociability - especially as a means of enhancing friendships - as well as a search for pleasurable excitement in the company of others. Thus, the paper concludes that the illicit use of drugs by 15-16-year-olds can only be meaningfully understood when viewed in light of these leisure preferences that are among the social processes through which drug use can become normalised in some young people's leisure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although children of parents with an alcohol or other drug (AOD) issue appear to assume a range of caring responsibilities within their families they have, until recently, been excluded from the growing body of young-carer research, policy and practice. This is problematic, as this group may experience greater levels of social exclusion whilst experiencing similar negative impacts of care as their caring peers. This paper discusses the findings of an exploratory qualitative research project conducted in Canberra, Australia which attempted to further understand these young people's experiences and to consider how they might best be supported. The paper challenges the way that young caring has been conceptualised and suggests that unless a number of conceptual, structural and organisational changes are made, young people caring for a parent with an AOD issue may remain relatively unsupported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present our experiences of conducting focus groups with young people as part of a participatory approach to research design and participant recruitment. The research is a prospective, 10-year, qualitative, longitudinal project investigating young people's daily lives, relationships, and identities, and the ways these change over time. It adopts a multi-method approach in which each participant has a choice about which methods to be involved with. Part of the project planning and recruitment was completed through focus groups held in schools across metropolitan and rural West Yorkshire with young people aged 13. The focus groups enabled us to recruit participants from a variety of backgrounds. They were also an important medium through which to elicit the views of young people (which were perceptively and constructively critical) about project design, methods development, and dissemination events. The paper focuses on what we learnt from these focus groups and considers the value of engaging participants in designing qualitative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a qualitative research project that explored the influence of basic skills on the school-to-work transitions of young adults. Large numbers of young people have poor skills yet it is a neglected area of study. We document how skill competencies act as barriers to learning and labour market opportunities, illustrating that some individuals are ‘reticent’ about accessing opportunities and that individual decision-making and agency are important to transitions. The paper illustrates the relationships between decision-making and the structuring effects of prior learning experiences and indicates therefore how structural conditioning and agential processes are linked and together shape transition routes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a systematic review of qualitative research to explore the resilient mothering practices that young, British, working-class mothers employ to care for their children. The synthesis of studies of UK mothers under the age of 20 demonstrates how young working-class women must mother in impoverished circumstances, at the same time as being discursively positioned outside the boundaries of ‘normal’ motherhood. Consequently, they utilize the only two resources to which they may have access: their families and their own personal capacities. Engaging with debates regarding the extent of the transformations of the social in late modernity, the paper discusses the most prominent of the young mothers’ practices: investment in the ‘good’ mother identity, maintaining kin relations, and prioritization of the mother/child dyad. The paper argues that, while the young mothers’ practices display reflexivity and individualism, they are also deeply embedded in, and structured by, social inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on youth drinking has brought out important features in young people's time- out cultures as and how they relate to the current neo-liberal social order with its expectation of self-governing individuals. However, previous research has not sufficiently considered cultural variations on the meaning of binge drinking for young people; in particular, there have been very few studies dealing with under-aged drinkers. This paper considers the applicability of binge drinking as ‘controlled loss of control’ in Northern and Southern European contexts by comparing young people's perceptions of binge drinking in Finland and Italy, which have conventionally been considered as representing sharply contrasting drinking traditions. The data consist of 28 focus-group interviews conducted at schools among 15-year-old pupils (N= 148) in Helsinki and Turin. In both countries, binge drinking was seen as risky, but it was associated with social norms that defined the limits of successful or failed drinking experience. Cultural variations were found especially in the ways self-control was defined with regard to drinking regulation. However, in both data the competence of the drinker and self-control was emphasized, thus contradicting the interpretation of binge drinking as loss of control or a time-out from the neo-liberal social order. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sexuality, self-image and identity formation are significant topics for all adolescents, including those with physical disabilities. However, for youth living with physical limitations, these issues are often ignored or overshadowed by more immediate health concerns due to discomfort, anxiety, or a lack of information that parents and care providers may have regarding these potentially sensitive topics. The data for this paper are part of a qualitative study which explored the development and challenges associated with emergent sexuality, identity formation, and self-image among Canadian adolescents with physical disabilities. The findings from this study show that youth with physical disabilities face the same challenges related to identity, self-image, and social acceptance as their able-bodied peers. However, for adolescents with physical disabilities, many of these pertinent issues are often ignored or overlooked by the adults in their lives. Conducting in-depth, qualitative research with youth who have physical limitations about significant aspects of their psychosocial development is an important way to not only fill in the current knowledge gaps and widespread societal misconceptions related to these issues, but it also helps to respect and legitimize the sexual and emotional needs of young people living with physical disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The last two decades have seen a significant growth of research studies concerned with young people living in rural places with a strong focus on social and economic inequalities. In these studies, equality has become a key organising principle in understanding young people's lives in settings that offer continuous social, economic, and cultural disadvantages. Drawing on a qualitative research study in a rural school in Victoria, Australia, this paper seeks to examine the ways in which young people make sense of and negotiate the challenges they encounter in their communities and in their post-secondary school transitions through two dominant discourses of equality: liberal egalitarianism and neoliberalism. These competing discourses conceptualise equality and approaches to addressing disadvantage differently. The former places the emphasis on a social approach underpinned by the idea of equality of opportunity, while the latter focuses on an individualised approach based on the notion of merit. I draw on a radical egalitarian critique by Iris Marion Young to reveal limitations from both positions and to show that adopting an individualised approach rather than a social one has significant implications for the way youth and institutions frame not only post-secondary school transitions and rural disadvantage but inequality as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing the sterile debate on the question of ‘youth de-politicisation’ requires taking into account the new structural and cultural conditions of the relationship between young people and politics. We must also seek to understand the multiple meanings that politics today has for young people by linking their logics of politicisation with the social dynamics of youth in modern society. In this paper, I present the results of qualitative analysis of focus group and interviews with approximately 100 young Spaniards. I discuss the main structures of meaning present in their discourses, and how young people combine and employ these meanings to orientate themselves in the public sphere. Phenomena such as political individualisation, the sudden incursions of youth into the public sphere or the intermittent and provisional presence and distancing from institutional politics are better understood from the perspective proposed here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jones' (2002) discussion of polarised transitions and the 'fast and slow lanes to adulthood' espoused by Bynner et al. (2002) are good examples of how dualistic language often permeates youth transitions discourses. This often results in transitions research concentrating on a dichotomy of experience during the youth phase. The primary purpose of this article is to develop the argument for the inclusion of detailed documentation and analysis of the transitions of intermediate groups who fall between the lines of this dualism. These young people constitute a 'missing middle' in relation to youth studies and UK educational policy. To support this argument, the paper turns to the results of a qualitative study of 18-24-year-old, male, front-line, retail employees in the South-East of England to illustrate how some young people do not find themselves neatly situated on one side of such categorical cleavages. These young men are following neither a NEET (not in education, employment or training) pathway nor a 'tidy', government preferred, route through post-compulsory education. Thus, studying such seemingly ordinary young people can contribute towards developing a more holistic understanding of youth in the contemporary period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2007, according to newspaper reports, Melbourne streets had become 'booze battlegrounds'. In the year that followed, binge drinking by young Australians was a major news focus and a subject for heightened public anxiety. Young drinkers were perceived to be out of control. In this paper, I draw on two qualitative research projects with young Australians to explore the contradictory social forces shaping their contemporary drinking landscape. Paradoxically, self-control is a major theme in the way participants discuss the management of their alcohol consumption. The concept of 'staging intoxication' is developed to explain how contemporary youth seek to enhance the pleasure and manage the risks of drinking. Ultimately, individual self-control is a weak moderating force on alcohol consumption in the face of market exploitation, incongruous state control and heavy drinking cultural expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While entitlements are often expressed as universal and linked to the rights citizens should have, young people's access to them is shaped by their social positioning, meaning that whether, and in what sense, they are citizens is pertinent. If citizens have access to universal entitlements, does this position certain young people who do not have such access as 'lesser youth' because their entitlements are reduced and citizenship diminished or non-existent? This paper examines whether and how young, separated migrants wanting refuge may be positioned as 'lesser youth'. It draws on a sample of them and multisector professionals examining qualitative data on accessing health care, sexual exploitation and rebuilding lives. The data suggest that the legislative and institutional framework they face militates against their enjoying the 'universal' entitlements of citizens. This reflects their positioning as 'lesser youth' excluded from the full rights citizens are entitled to. Such a positioning is in large part underpinned by contested notions of nationhood, belonging and entitlement central to communitarian citizenship but which exclude them. We argue that a meaningful citizenship for these youth requires a contestation of restrictive communitarian ideas and practices in ways forwarding a more inclusive and socially just multicultural UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on qualitative data from young men and their female partners in their twenties, this paper critically reviews debates about young people's perceptions of their futures. It argues that the anticipation of either a 'destructured' or a 'standardised' life course does not simply vary between different categories of young people; rather, it shows young people's experience of tension between these two trajectories. Moreover, in the case of estate agents and firefighters, interviewing both members of a couple revealed gendered differences in how future trajectories were being realised, women tending to direct and 'manage' young men's orientations towards 'adulthood', often by asserting chronologised milestones. In that our sample drew young men from three occupations with cultures seen as more or less stereotypically masculinised or feminised (firefighters, estate agents and hairdressers), our data also show class and occupational differences and, among estate agents and firefighters, their reflection in the gendered negotiations that contributed to couples' everyday heterosexual lives. At the intersection between gendered patterns of work, consumption, and fertility, then, young estate agents and firefighters and their female partners sought to plan shared lives that nonetheless cleaved to sometimes competing priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]