Search

This paper uses empirical evidence to explore the nature of employment transitions for a cohort of marginalised young people in England. The findings presented reveal the importance of past experiences, largely determined by prevailing opportunity structures, in shaping the present and reiterate the need to see transition as a historical process. Longitudinal data collected as part of an evaluation of a youth employment programme called Talent Match provides the evidence for the paper. The routes participants took in terms of securing and sustaining employment are examined. The paper develops a typology of different transitional groups to explore these routes based on the movement (or lack of) into and out of employment. The relative importance of different factors in explaining the groupings are assessed, with results underlining how the ongoing change participants were encountering in the present was inextricably linked to their past. In response, this paper suggests a reemphasis on understanding youth as both a stage of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’, seeing youth as both a condition in its own right but also part of the life course process, and calls for a more dynamic understanding of youth transitions among policymakers and those designing youth employment programmes.

Youth political disengagement continues to be a major issue facing contemporary democracies that needs to be better understood. There is an existing literature on what determines youth participation in terms of socio-demographic factors, however, scholars have not given much consideration to the macro-level determinants. In this paper, I outline an empirical analysis of what determines political participation among young people using the Eurobarometer 375 survey data from 28 European Union countries. I argue that while socio-demographic factors are crucial for youth political participation, context matters in shaping levels of political participation among young people. The results from the logistic regression analyses indicate that democratic maturity influences patterns of political participation among young people in the EU. The results show that youth engagement in different modes of political participation varies significantly across distinctive democracies, where individuals situated in established EU democracies are more likely to be politically active. The findings raise fresh concerns about existing levels of young people’s engagement in politics in advanced and new democracies. This paper also contributes to the comparative research on young people’s participation in politics.

The conventional view since the early 2000s has been that participation in higher education (HE) is a risky pathway for disadvantaged young people in England; the social risk of entering an alien environment combines with the financial risk of rising costs and questionable long-term returns. This riskiness has been constructed as a major barrier to participation. However, national administrative data cast doubt on whether this analysis still holds true. Despite significant rises in tuition fees, the proportion of disadvantaged young people entering HE has continued to rise, with advantaged groups seemingly being more price-sensitive. Data from recent qualitative studies has also suggested that young people are now less attuned to risks. This paper considers whether circumstances in wider society have shifted perceptions of risk. The volatility resulting from the global financial crisis appears to have repositioned HE as a less risky option than early entry to the labour market, especially with more jobs becoming ‘graduate’, while the social risk has declined as HE has diversified. The paper draws on theoretical perspectives from Beck, Boudon, Simon and Kahneman to argue that many disadvantaged young people now view HE as a form of ‘insurance’ against an uncertain future.

Young people are increasingly called upon to invest in educational qualifications, experience opportunities and other character forming activities in order to stand out from the crowd. This fetishizing of generic distinctiveness is promoted throughout education in England, and particularly Higher Education. This paper considers the policy and theoretical implications of the quest to enfranchise distinctiveness in English HE. From a policy perspective the universal promotion of distinction reflects how recent neoliberal reforms in HE have been moderated by a commitment to a liberal ethos of equality of opportunity. Theoretically the mantra of standing out from the crowd is emblematic of the entrepreneurial self as a tool of governmentality. The expectation of compulsory distinction encapsulates the duality of individualisation and regulation that is central to the project of governmentality. This duality is also implicit in the activity of enterprise and how it is calibrated by competition. Being entrepreneurial stimulates innovation but the uncertainty of competition may simultaneously stimulate isomorphic behaviours. The paper concludes by reviewing what the promotion of generic distinctiveness infers for young people and how the promotion of distinction is also bound up with the mantra of confidence.

In recent years a plethora of arts-based projects and interventions targeting marginalised children and young people have emerged a number of which have focused specifically on music-making. Resulting research has often highlighted the social, psychological and emotional benefits involved (see, for example, De Viggiani et al, 2013) 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.

Online social interaction has become integral to contemporary social life, adding new dimensions to how young people learn, interact, and perceive themselves and one another. This paper presents theoretical insights from a year-long ethnographic study within a Scottish secondary school, where participant observation and qualitative interviews were used to explain pupils’ informal social relationships. Here, pupils aged 11-18 constructed and negotiated a hyper-surveillanced social space within which many became (or strived to become) visible and ‘known’ amongst others and where online presentations of self were highly important. This facilitated a celebrity-esque culture amongst the pupil population whereby pupils learnt from and emulated macro celebrity culture and often framed social interactions as entertainment. Central to these practices, was a continual desire to “make gains in distinction” by demonstrating high social status amongst peers. The paper explores the resulting implications for teaching, learning and pupil wellbeing within contemporary educational environments.

In the UK, there has been growing concern about young people’s understanding of sexual consent, with the views of young people themselves often lost in academic and educational policy debates. However, the focus on high rates of sexual violence has meant a lack of attention on the everyday negotiation of consensual heterosexual activity, leading to assumptions being made regarding young people’s lack of understanding of sexual consent. This paper emerges from a wider study of over 500 young people which sought to uncover their understanding of the issues. Drawing on data from workshops and the open text responses to an on-line survey the findings presented in this paper show that the majority of heterosexual young people understood the complexity of sexual consent as an embodied process, which can be difficult to define, talk about or practice uniformly. This complex understanding, in which sexual consent is a continuum rather than a dichotomy, has implications for sexual education initiatives. We argue that it is only by providing a closer understanding of how - within consensual sexual activities - young people understand and enact sexual consent through a range of embodied communication strategies that education surrounding sexual assault will become meaningful.

Prior research has found that persistently delinquent youth or more violent youth were less popular than their less delinquent peers (Young, 2013). However, recent research has also found that weapon carrying is associated with being more popular in adolescence (Dijkstra et al., 2010). The present paper examines the perceived popularity of adolescents who carry weapons in comparison to those who both carry and use weapons in acts of violence or threatened violence. Data consist of two waves from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Analyses use OLS regression with lagged predictors. This paper found no differences in number of friends between weapon carriers and weapon users. However, among both male and female gang members, those who did not use or carry weapons (abstainers) named significantly fewer friends than weapon users. Among females, weapon abstainers both named and were named by significantly more people than weapon users. These differences were not observed for males. Implications of these results and directions for future research are discussed.

In recent years sport-based interventions have been implemented as a mechanism via which to target marginalised youth in relation to the development of social inclusion. Much of the political rhetoric surrounding social inclusion programmes highlights engagement with education, employment, or training, as key metrics. This has led some scholars to observe that conceptualising social inclusion in this way can act to further marginalise young people who fail to engage with these metrics. In contrast, this paper seeks to employ an alternative understanding of social inclusion, which uses the concepts of recognition and acceptance, to infer how participation in sports-based programmes may enable marginalised youth to meet mainstream societal expectations and aid with social assimilation. Drawing upon findings from two small-scale studies of sport-based interventions located in three UK cities, this paper places participant accounts at the centre of the analysis to explore broader notions of pro-social development in relation to recognition and interpersonal acceptance. The paper concludes by suggesting that within contexts in which young people are able to generate strong interpersonal relationships with key personnel (such as coaches), and which are built upon trust, recognition and developing self-worth, there is clear potential for sport-based programmes to incubate social assimilation.

This paper focuses on the everyday lives of young people with a severe mental illness living temporarily at a social psychiatric housing facility in Denmark. In the paper we take a temporal approach to the analysis of this and we draw on Henri Lefebvre’s work on rhythm analysis to investigate the differences between the rhythms of everyday life within the institution and the rhythms of what is perceived as the everyday life of ‘ordinary’ youth. We also show how digital technologies play a central part in these institutionalised everyday lives by creating connections as well as disruptions between different time-spaces. Centrally, we point to the positive and negative consequences this has for the young peoples’ sense of self. Empirically, the paper is based on a four-month ethnographic fieldwork at the housing facility in 2014.

Policy and research portray sport volunteering as a means by which young people can develop skills and perform active citizenship. This paper draws on qualitative research with participants in a UK sport volunteering programme to critically examine young people’s volunteering journeys and how these are shaped by their formation and mobilisation of capital. The results show how programme structures and practices, such as selection criteria, privilege young people with higher levels of cultural and physical capital, and afford these youth additional opportunities to accumulate and mobilise cultural and social capital. The paper argues for a more critical understanding of youth sport volunteering; one that recognises that sport volunteering can reserve the practice of active citizenship for privileged youth.

Although the outmigration choices of young adults from peripheral to urban regions to attend higher education have been researched extensively, young adults’ decisions to stay in, nearby, or return to, the peripheral home region have received less attention. This paper explores how young adults who are engaged in higher education re-imagine narratives related to notions of ‘leaving’ in their mobility biographies to justify their choice to stay in or return to their peripheral home region. We conducted in-depth interviews with postgraduate students in peripheral regions in Denmark and the Netherlands. Our findings confirm the existence of a mobility imperative for young adults in peripheral regions reproduced by both our participants and their social relations. However, we additionally find that young adults re-imagine narratives of ‘leaving’ which simultaneously correspond with contemporary discourses on place and residential mobility in the form of valuing (dis)connection to place, experiencing urban lifestyles, and life phase transitions, but which also open up possibilities for re-evaluating the attractiveness of often stigmatized peripheral regions. We suggest that narratives of ‘leaving’ during higher education help young adults to build what we call ‘symbolic mobility capital’ to mitigate the negative connotations related to living in a peripheral region.

This paper aims to better understand the relationship between young people's aspirations towards education and jobs, and the context in which they are formed, especially to understand better the role of disadvantaged places in shaping young people's aspirations. Policy makers maintain that disadvantaged areas are associated with low aspirations and there is support for this position from academic work on neighbourhood effects and local labour markets, but evidence is slim. Using a two-stage survey of young people in disadvantaged settings in three British cities, the paper provides new data on the nature of young peoples’ aspirations, how they change during the teenage years, and how they relate to the places where they are growing up. The findings are that aspirations are very high and, overall, they do not appear to be depressed in relation to the jobs available in the labour market either by the neighbourhood context or by young people's perceptions of local labour markets. However, there are significa...

Following recent critiques of the metrocentric nature of global youth studies, this paper explores the role of place in current research on youth political action in Sweden. Drawing on Agnew’s [2011. “Chapter 23: Space and Place.” In Handbook of Geographical Knowledge, edited by J. Agnew, and D. Livingstone. London: Sage] concept of place and using qualitative interpretive review as our method, we examined three sets of research publications on three different aspects of youth political action in Sweden. Our analysis found that place was addressed differently in each set of publications: youth political socialization and civic engagement were approached as placeless, street protests were examined as place assumed and urban justice movements were studied as place-based. The first two sets of publications contribute to reproducing a metrocentric understanding of youth political action, where urban areas are constructed as the key settings for political action among young people, while rural or peripheral areas are assumed to work in the same way or are depicted as non-political. By contrast, the publications on urban justice movements offered an alternative by exploring political action as place-based. The need to study the place-specific ways that young people do politics is discussed, with its potential to further the understanding of how young people do politics from where they are.

This paper explores young women’s expectations on future work-family reconciliation in Finland, a Nordic country well-known for the promotion of gender equality. Utilising Sen’s capabilities approach, we content-analysed thirty individual interviews to identify differences in women’s expectations and their perceived capabilities in future work and care. The results showed that irrespective of their labour market status and educational attainment, the women’s expectations were contradictory, reflecting a current Finnish gender culture that embraces both the ideal of shared parenthood and the primacy of maternal care. Between-group differences were also found. The employed women perceived themselves as having the capability to balance work, family and, personal time in the future. The women who were studying and had higher education- and career-related expectations perceived themselves as capable of combating gender inequality in their future working lives. In contrast, the unemployed women perceived their capabilities in both their future work and care as limited, thereby constraining their agency to realise their choices in work-family reconciliation and family decision-making. These findings indicate that Finnish women’s expectations on future work-family reconciliation are shaped by institutional, societal and individual socioeconomic factors. peerReviewed

Dominant debates and digital upskilling strategies in Scotland have been long underpinned by the notion that engagement with technologies can transform young people’s lives. This paper offers a critique of such dominant understandings and contributes to the scarce research on the impact of technologies on disadvantaged young people’s life chances. It reports on qualitative fieldwork exploring everyday lives, transitions and technology use amongst 22 NEET-identified Scottish young people aged 16–24, drawing on thinking tools from Bourdieu. Findings show that participants followed ‘accelerated’ transitions towards vocational pathways, whilst technologies played a liminal role in making occupational choices. Furthermore, processes underpinning the post-16 transitions policy field were found to strongly shape the young people’s trajectories, directing them towards the least valuable options in terms of work and training. Concurrently, uncertainties about how to navigate the realm of work and perform the self in relation to the labour force constituted a common feature of participants labouring subjectivities and these were reflected in the ways they used technologies while looking for opportunities. However, even when the young people acquired digital employability skills, these had little impact on their transitions as the old social divisions were a much stronger influence.

There is a well-documented association between histories of state care and housing instability. This paper examines care leavers’ experience of securing housing during the transition out of care th...

This paper explores the temporalities and emotions of youth left-behind by migrant parents by using Jennifer Lois’ temporal emotion work as an analytical lens to foreground youth’s management of co...

This paper interrogates how three key concepts in youth studies – ‘transitions’, ‘the enterprising self’ and ‘mobilities’ – have historically centred the experiences of white/Anglo young people in ...

This paper calls for renewed consideration of the way research subjects are selected in the study of subcultures. All too often, subcultural researchers limit themselves to the use of one or two of...

This paper investigates to what extent the likelihood of young people being long-term NEET can be explained by low literacy skills, how this varies across advanced countries, and how this cross-national variation can be explained by education and social policies. We use PIAAC data and include macro-level indicators on education and social policies. We analyze the likelihood of being long-term NEET versus being in employment or in education/training among some 34,000 young people aged 20-30 from 25 countries. We find that low-literate young people are more likely to be long-term NEET. While NEET risks are associated with countries' institutional characteristics, this does not mean that these characteristics and policies always work in favour of low-literate young people. Although high levels of (enabling) ALMP generally reduce the risk of being NEET, they do so less for low-literate young people. Additionally, young people living in social-democratic welfare states are less likely to be NEET, but low-literate young people seem to profit less from this.

This paper presents an examination of ‘frexting’ (‘friend’ + ‘sexting’), which is defined as the exchange of personally-produced intimate images among friends. It draws upon accounts of frexting sh...

Whilst the number of children in custody declines, the complex needs of many of them have increased. A review of the youth justice system stated that education needs to be the central pillar in preventing offending. Research suggests that education fails children, by prioritising reputation and the standards agenda over providing care and education that meets individual needs (Runswick-Cole. 2011. “Time to End the Bias Towards Inclusion.” British Journal of Special Education 38 (3): 11). This paper explores this failure for children prior to and in custody itself, and relates this to a theoretical model that combines children’s need and self-efficacy. It suggests that until children are guaranteed an environment where their basic needs are met, there is little hope of either education or training helping them to access a life free from crime, whatever other policy changes in custody are implemented. This research shows that current provisions, for children in custody, fail to support children’s needs around safety, belonging and self-esteem. Thus, it is no surprise that children in Secure Training Centres fail to self-actualise their educational abilities, as they lack the self-efficacy to successfully engage with education.

Drawing on empirical data from two individual research projects, this paper extends the literature on child and youth incarceration and offers a previously unexplored analysis of experiences and tr...

In the UK, transition to university has become regarded as the ‘normative’ next step for young people following completion of their post-16 education. This paper examines the views of 23 young peop...

Little attention has been given to young workers’ uses of private employment agencies as part of their job search and this paper seeks to rectify this omission. It does so by presenting a critique ...

This paper demonstrates how young people make sense of religion through local places in the urban context while moving from youth to young adulthood. We draw on in-depth interviews–including a mental map-making exercise–with twenty-four young Muslims (18–30) from a wide range of cultural backgrounds living in Metro Vancouver (Canada). Their narratives reveal young people ‘live’ religion in various local places and how spatialities of lived religion change over time. We highlight how making sense of religion is reflected in the changing meaning of the mosque and relates to the increased salience of places shared with young Muslims in which our participants negotiate religion in the context of their everyday lives in the city. While many studies on Muslim identities have established the complexities and dynamics of negotiating religion at specific local places, we argue for a focus on relations between lived religion at various local places over time. These spatiotemporal complexities are able to capture how making sense of religion is spatially and fluidly manifested in the urban context of Metro Vancouver.

This article studies the extent to which ethnic minority and ethnic majority students in highly diverse urban schools identify with Flemish and European identity. In doing so this paper aims to discuss to what extent these sub-national and supranational identities can function as shared identities within the multiple identity belongings of teenagers and what the impact is of teacher support and perceived discrimination in schools on these phenomena. The analysis is based upon a survey among Belgian native and Moroccan origin students in the 5th and 6th year of secondary education in Antwerp, one of Europe's most diverse cities. The results show that Moroccan students identify more strongly with a European identity than with a Flemish identity, while Flemish native students identify more strongly with Flemish than with European identity. This results in a large 'identity gap' with respect to Flemish identity but a much smaller gap with respect to European identity. In addition, our results show a positive effect of teacher support on Flemish and European identity for Belgian students, while it only has a positive effect on European identity for Moroccan students. The broader implications of the findings are discussed.

This paper interrogates claims that millennial youth are being jilted by gilded baby boomers. The interrogation is by comparing the education and early experiences in labour and housing markets, th...

Using in-depth interview data of young adults who participated in the University of Kent student occupation, this paper (1) explores the process by which young people enter into and engage in high-...

Young women tell different stories about teenage pregnancies. Their stories are embedded in the storyscape of their environment, which offers a limited set of narratives. Normative discourses influence the stories young women tell about their pregnancies. Social norms and stigma play an important role in the construction of the meaning of teenage pregnancies. However, the embodiment of being pregnant constitutes meaning as well. This paper draws on findings from a qualitative study conducted in 2015 among 46 young Dutch women who got pregnant before their 20th birthday. Our study explores how young women navigate the moral arena when they are confronted with a teenage pregnancy and which role the embodiment of pregnancy plays in the construction of social meanings. The concept of storyscapes visualises how young women are constrained by their embeddedness in multiple storyscapes, defined by different and often contrasting audiences. Nevertheless, our study indicates that the momentum of pregnancy can offer agentic possibilities to take up another position towards their social environment and develop narrative agency.

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.

Across many advanced economies, changing housing dynamics have destabilized traditional adulthood transitions. This article examines how such transformations, especially in the aftermath of the economic crisis, affect fundamental societal expectations and aspirations surrounding tenure choices and home leaving. Through a series of discussion groups and interviews among young adults in Spain – a salient context of embedded homeownership culture – the study reveals how the crisis has undermined life-course transitions and upended discourses surrounding tenure norms. Homeownership has transformed from a dominant symbol of stability and security to one of dispossession and financial risk. Conversely, where pre-crisis discourses dismissed rental, the tenure is portrayed as providing more security in the face of necessary flexibility. Our research reveals that, although traditional ‘homeownership culture’ has not disappeared from the collective imaginary and appears nuanced by social class, it has become increasingly detached from leaving the parental home. The paper exposes the extent to which dominant housing discourses may be upended even within the context of a particularly embedded Southern European homeowner society. We contend that when housing dynamics are coupled with underlying transformations in aspirations and norms, there may be significant societal outcomes., This work was supported by Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, [grant number FPU14/ 02756]; MOVITRA IV Spanish National I+D+I Plan Subproject: RECSOC ‘Procesos de reconfiguración social metropolitana’ [grant number CSO2014-55780-C3-3-P].

In this paper we discuss how art workshops can be used to examine dimensions of belonging. We draw on our findings of collaborative ethnographic fieldwork with unaccompanied refugee minors in Finland. The practical aim of the art project was to offer a platform for transcultural communication and interaction, and to support mutual understanding and solidarity among the refugee minors and Finnish pupils. The collaborative ethnographic approach gave us an opportunity to meet the young people through working together and be equally active members of the group sharing the same classroom. Theoretically we aim to enlarge the understanding of the sense of belonging and the role of the subjective agency of the unaccompanied minors, including everyday participation. We highlight the practices through which the minors can be supported in an embracing manner in their everyday lives in new host societies.

There has been increasing media and political questioning of the national loyalties and identities held by young British Muslims, with a particular focus on those seen to separate themselves through strict and religiously observant dress and lifestyles. This paper draws primarily on research focusing on the meanings of ‘Britishness’ held amongst a group of visibly observant young Muslim adults. Empirical evidence is provided to demonstrate that although these young adults demonstrated an explicit and visible sense of Muslim identity, this co-existed without any conscious conflict with their British identity. The young adults’ acknowledgement of their religious attachment developed from a positive and proactive identification with Islam rather than one in opposition or rebellion against a British identity. Therefore, in a wider context, their lives must not be analysed only through the lens of religion, dress and appearance as this has repercussions in relation to national policy formation and subsequent perceptions of wider society.

While discourses that define and demarcate young people such that they become legitimate targets of negative practices of marginalisation and exclusion have not disappeared, these are no longer the dominant discourses and modes of governing youth. Constructions of youth as self-determining subjects and empowerment polices of youth participation increasingly animate contemporary approaches to governing young people throughout the West and beyond. Until recently, the dominant critique of such developments consisted of accusations of failed attempts to realise certain principles in practice or of their ideological functions. There is however an emerging critical youth studies literature that analyses such developments drawing on the work of Beck and Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’. In this paper, I argue that while these studies challenge some of the assumptions upon which such developments rest, they are yet to challenge the extent to which these contemporary ways of constructing and governing youth are new. Using Foucault’s genealogical method my research traces an unacknowledged nineteenth century history of these common ways of constituting and governing youth today. To conclude I consider the strategic usefulness and ramifications of these findings for critical youth studies and policies of youth participation.

There is burgeoning literature on cities that host major cultural events. However, there is surprisingly very little empirical research focusing specifically on young people and cities of culture, so we have limited knowledge in terms of how young people actually experience and interpret cultural events. Given this, we offer an important and timely contribution to such debates. Our spatial focus is Derry/Londonderry (D/L) in Northern Ireland. During 2013 D/L was the UK’s inaugural City of Culture (CoC). The bid document and legacy plans for CoC stated that young people would be ‘cultural assets’ during 2013 and the ‘ultimate beneficiaries’ of the CoC legacy (Derry City Council, 2010, 2013a, b). This paper unpacks and analyses the extent to which young people in D/L related to and engaged with CoC and, arguably more importantly, how CoC affected their plans and aspirations for the future. Our research problematizes the claim that young people were the ‘ultimate beneficiaries’ of CoC; most strikingly, it shows that young people, despite offering very positive views, both expect and desire to live in cities other than D/L. As such, the debilitating long-standing trend of economic migration of young people will continue raising important issues for local stakeholders.

The language of young people is often viewed very negatively by some sections of the mainstream media and by some social commentators in the UK. While this is nothing new – older generations routinely despair of how the youth of today are ruining the language – what is different now is the added element of ethnicity, whereby young people of various ethnicities are perceived as using some kind of ‘ghetto grammar’ or ‘Jafaican’ which carry often explicit connotations of ‘sounding black’. This paper challenges the mainstream view by firstly introducing the linguistic take on this emerging Multicultural Urban British English, and then exploring the views of young people themselves on how they use language by taking qualitative data from a linguistic ethnography project involving 14–16-year-olds in a nonmainstream urban educational setting. The young people provide insights into their language that are in complete opposition to the views so often expressed in the media, and which instead suggest that linguistic features that were previously strongly associated with specific ethnicities are being used in new and innovative ways. Refreshingly, it would appear that for many young people ethnicity is simply not a consideration, at least in relation to language.

Recent decades have seen the growth of various strands of rightwing populist political orientations, where populism and critique of immigration policies have been central. These ideological developments have caused concern for the legitimacy of social and political institutions. The question explored in this paper, based on Norwegian survey data, is ‘Which types of right political orientations exist among young people, and how do these political attitudes affect trust in social and political institutions?’ The results reveal the existence of both a populist ‘new right’ political orientation similar to the ideology of the Progress Party and a nativist ideology. The new right orientation contains two sets of variables: (i) economic liberalism/state scepticism and (ii) nationalist values. For trust in political institutions, the emerging picture is complex because the nationalist dimension of both the populist orientation and the nativist ideological orientation implies a high level of trust in political institutions. To the extent the new right political orientations causes mistrust, it seems to come from the liberal economic, anti-statist values included in this ideology. Based on these findings, future researchers should distinguish more clearly between the ideological dimensions going into populist political right orientations and the relationship between attitudes and more practical implications of such ideologies.

Within lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) research there is increasing health-related scholarship on trans lives, with a growing awareness of the impact of health inequalities on trans well-being. The aim of the paper is to provide greater understanding of transgender young people’s views of what is needed to promote their emotional well-being and resilience by undertaking specific analysis of data collected as part of wider research with young people (n = 97). The study utilised participatory qualitative methods with a cross sectional design generating data via a focus group with trans youth (n = 5), followed by thematic analysis. Findings suggest that both individual and collective capacities or resources enable and sustain resilience and well-being for trans young people. The adversity trans youth face is present in school, the community and in healthcare, but they are able to find places where they feel safe and connected to others. Practitioners, teachers and school nurses are well...

This paper considers how the practice of ‘Othering’ is used by white working-class boys in Boremund, South London to mark identity boundaries and reaffirm their habitus. Through unearthing themes of difference within the young men’s accounts, the work identifies various ways of ‘doing masculinity’ in two social groups, ‘Boremund Boys’ and ‘emos’, who contrasted greatly in style but who were of the same race, class, and ethnicity. Focusing on the identity negotiations of a small cohort, aged 14–16, the data indicate how a normative white male identity specific to this locale is policed and how ‘Othering’ is employed as a strategy. Using Bourdieu’s tools alongside the hermeneutic of heteronormativity, the research explores how emos, through inverting a traditional working-class masculinity, brought the habitus of Boremund Boys into disjuncture. Within the field of masculinity, the habitus of Boremund Boys, through a process of reorientation, reconciles competing and contrasting conceptions of what it is to be a white working-class male in South London. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The current paper explores perceptions in relation to bullying, with a particular focus on discussions around resilience, drawing on data from focus group interviews with young people (mean age 14 years old), parents and teachers. We regard self-conduct and the governance of human behaviour as situated within a neoliberal framework, locating accountability and responsibility within the individual. Our methodological framework consists of a multi-level ‘synthesized’ discourse analysis. Firstly, drawing on discursive psychology, we focus on the interactive accomplishments of talk, such as managing facts, blame and accountability. The second level of discourse analysis focuses on the wider discourses that participants draw on to make sense of themselves, including common sense discourses and ideologies. In their narratives, the participants constructed resilience in relation to bullying in terms of individual empowerment, responsibility and ‘manning up’; a skill that can be taught and acquired. Not only that, long-term implications of bullying were negated in favour of a neoliberal approach towards self-responsibility in the here and now. This has implications for strategies in supporting young people in building resilience. More research is needed to establish key notions in relation to resilience, and the multidimensionality of protective factors in relation to bullying.

In recent years, the European Union (EU) passed through a significant economic crisis. All across Europe, European young people are among the groups which are hit hardest, with youth unemployment rates rising to over 50% in member states such as Greece and Spain. In the classical migration literature, it is suggested that such unfavourable economic climate would make people more likely to move abroad. Whereas in press releases we are regularly confronted with stories about South European young adults with tertiary education working in bars in Northern European cities, limited empirical evidence exists as such on the relationship between the recent Euro-crisis and migration aspirations. This paper addresses this gap in the academic literature. Using data from Flash Eurobarometer 395, I investigate which micro- and macro-level characteristics influence migration aspirations of young people across the member states of the EU. The results reveal the importance of individual characteristics and feelings of discontent with the current climate in explaining migration aspirations. Furthermore, I detect a negative relationship of relative welfare levels with migration aspirations, and a positive relationship of the youth unemployment ratio. Together, the results suggest that potential young intra-EU movers are positively selected from the population.

The General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) is the standard qualification undertaken by pupils in England and Wales at the end of year 11 (age 15–16). GCSEs continue to play an important and central role in young people's educational and employment pathways. Within the sociology of youth, there has been recent interest in documenting the lives and educational experiences of ‘ordinary’ young people. In this paper, we analyse school GCSE attainment at the subject area level. This is an innovative approach and our motivation is to explore substantively interesting patterns of attainment that might be concealed in analyses of overall attainment or attainment within individual subjects. We analyse data from the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales using a latent variable approach. The modelling process uncovered four distinctive latent educational groups. One latent group is characterised by high levels of overall attainment, whereas another latent group is characterised by poor GCSE performance. There are two latent groups with moderate or ‘middle’ levels of GCSE attainment. These two latent groups have similar levels of agglomerate attainment, but one group performs better in science and the other performs better in arts GCSEs.

The geographies of the current generation of young people are markedly distinct from previous generations by virtue of their access to a virtual playground. The vast majority of young people now engage in video gaming as a leisure activity. Drawing on findings from the 2009/2010 WHO Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study this paper set out to investigate the factors that might be associated with higher levels of video gaming. Information was collected from 4404 school students aged 11, 13 and 15 years, using anonymised self-completed questionnaires. Higher usage was defined as game play exceeding two hours a day. Separate analyses were conducted for boys and girls. For both genders higher levels of game playing was associated with early adolescence, opposite sex friends and minimal parental mediation. Bullying and going to bed hungry were associated with higher usage for boys only, while life satisfaction and family activities were linked to girls’ game playing only. Parents were identified as eff...

This paper presents a single case study of one street gang in one London borough. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 gang members, or former gang members, and seven practitioners. The practitioners and gang members/ex-gang members reported different perspectives on how the gang was structured and drug dealing was organised. The gang members/ex-gang members suggested that the gang is a loose social network with little recognisable formal organisation. Although individual gang members sell drugs, the gang should not be viewed as a drug dealing organisation. Rather it is a composition of individual drug dealers who cooperate out of mutual self-interest. Therefore, some gang members are best described as independent entrepreneurs while others are subcontractors looking to ‘go solo’. The seven practitioners, however, tended to describe a more hierarchically structured gang, with formal recruitment processes. This divergence of perspective highlights an important consideration for policy and research. 0.973 JCR (2015) Q2, 40/93 Social sciences, interdisciplinary UEM

This paper explored how imaginary audience and personal fable ideations contribute to adolescent indoor tanning intentions directly and indirectly through the way they shape pro-tanning attitude and association with peers who use tanning beds. Five hundred and ninety-five male (n = 207) and female (n = 387) adolescents, ranging in age from 11 to 19 (M = 16.87; SD = 1.34) years completed a cross-sectional survey. Measures included imaginary audience, personal fable (three dimensions: invulnerability, uniqueness, and omnipotence), pro-tanning attitude, association with peers who use tanning beds, and tanning bed use intentions. Bootstrapping analyses documented that imaginary audience ideations are indirectly associated with indoor tanning intentions through the mediation of pro-tanning attitude and association with peers who use tanning beds. Of the personal fable ideations, only invulnerability ideation is indirectly associated with indoor tanning intentions through the mediation of association with peers who use tanning beds. Design and evaluation of interventions and campaigns to reduce indoor tanning must be targeted to adolescents varying in imaginary audience ideations differently.