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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While research on youthful drinking is extensive, the literature has been geographically skewed towards urban settings. As a potential corrective to this, our focus in this paper is on youthful drinking in rural Denmark. Based on 22 in-depth interviews with young drinkers, this paper explores the drinking practices of rural youth. More specifically, drawing on Antonsich's [2010. "Searching for belonging–an analytical framework." Geography Compass 4 (6): 644–659] notion of place-belongingness, we examine how sentiments of belonging relate to locally embedded drinking practices. We highlight the extent to which rural drinking places are characterized by the participation of young men, whose educational and professional aims are predominantly tied to the local community and activities within it. In so doing, we show that these contexts are primarily associated with 'drinking a single', as opposed to drinking to intoxication like their urban peers. We argue further that these 'lighter' but frequent forms of alcohol use, which we term 'congenial drinking', are related to accomplishments of place-belongingness and stand out as a gendered, classed and place-bound phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines perceptions of subjective age identity presented in interviews with eight young people who had been in out-of-home care during their upbringing. Research shows that care-leavers often experience a variety of vulnerabilities and challenges in comparison to their same-aged peers. Additionally, they often do not organise their lives according to the same educational, professional, and relational structures as other young people. In their everyday lives, care-leavers are nonetheless confronted with expectations that assume they have a normal biographical life course, meaning a life that progresses from childhood to adulthood via a relatively stable and predictable pattern. Consequently, they evaluate themselves using socially defined roles connected to formal and informal age structuring. The findings emphasise perceptions of multiple subjective ages at the same time no matter the context, which seems to differ the perceptions of the participants from that of their same-aged peers. Additionally, the findings indicate that perceptions of subjective age and life course developments are flexible and can change in ways that do not follow a normal biographical life course, but despite this flexibility also can consist of experiences of being out of sync with same-aged peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a time of heightened international debate about youth precarity, how do we understand and support transitions to adulthood for people who have been in care? This paper reports on a qualitative longitudinal study of 75 young adults (aged 16–32 years) from Norway, Denmark, and England. All had been in care during childhood and at the time of their recruitment to the study all were in education, employment or training. Against the context of a literature largely focused on transitions specific to 'leaving care', our analysis addresses aspects of early adulthood which are not specific to being care experienced; some (such as romantic break-ups, or moving home) might be considered normative, whilst others (such as changing course or dropping out of university) are less common. Cross-national analysis shows how care and wider welfare systems intersect with informal networks in everyday lives, functioning to scaffold young people, or to exacerbate precarity, as they navigate biographical transitions in early adulthood. The research shows the importance of developing socially and culturally located biographical accounts of 'transition' that recognise the complexities, uncertainties and essential interdependence of everyday lives and emerging adulthoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is broad agreement that precarious work is a growing problem, and that it is highly prevalent among young employees. The financial crisis in 2008 has reinforced the need for knowledge about how precarious work affects young employees. This paper explores how the concept of precarious work may apply differentially to different groups of young people at work and whether this challenges the term 'transition', which until now has been one of the core elements within contemporary youth research. We examine discursive representations of precarious work, vulnerability and risks among young Danish employees aged 18-24 in the healthcare sector, the metal industry and retail trade captured in 46 interviews involving 74 participants. Results are discussed taking into consideration the Nordic welfare model with an active labour marked policy. We conclude that precarious work is not, in fact, simply a characteristic of young employees' work as such, but rather it is related to their position in the labour market and the type of jobs in which they are employed. While some are in transition, others are at risk of being trapped in precarious and risky working conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During election times, societal actors frequently employ specific get-out-the-vote campaigns to mobilize young voters' turnout and engagement with the election. Although such campaigns receive praise in society, little is known about how effective they are and if they shape longer lasting types of political engagement. This study presents novel evidence about the differential effects of a multi-platform get-out-the-vote campaign in Denmark, and investigates how such campaigns can help to address the important democratic problem of youth disengagement. Based on a two-wave panel study among high school- and university students in Denmark (n = 275), the effects of classroom interventions, political event participation, and social media use on political interest, knowledge, and political efficacy are explored. The results suggests that get-out-the-vote campaigns are able to strengthen youths' political engagement, but that civic education and political events may be more important than communication via social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on credit consumption and increasing debt among Danish young adults by viewing this as closely related to new cultural concepts of money in credit based markets. Along with deregulation of financial markets and the introduction of new forms of credit, most OECD countries have in recent years witnessed a change in consumers' financial practices including an increasing role of credit in consumption. Young people seem particularly likely to obtain credit and to get into debt. Even in the relatively affluent Nordic countries we have witnessed an increase in problematic debt particularly among the youngest part of the population. Financial practices of contemporary young people, however, are still under-researched. Drawing on empirical data from Denmark, the article analyses the risk of debt among middle and upper middle class Danish young adults by relating individual financial practices to changing meanings and categories of 'money', 'credit' and 'debt' in contemporary 'credit-consumer culture'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses variation in the family background of young homeless people in a cohort of young Danes. The study is based on administrative data for individuals who were 18 years old in 2007 and their parents. Homelessness is measured by shelter use over a five-year period. Data also cover education, employment, mental illness, substance abuse problems and placement outside home in childhood for the young persons, and education, employment, civil status, mental illness and substance abuse problems for their parents. A cluster analysis identifies two groups, each comprising half of the young shelter users. In the first group, social marginalisation is transmitted between generations, as most parents have low education and mental illness or substance abuse problems, and are unemployed. In contrast, the young people in the second group come from wider socioeconomic backgrounds, with few of their parents having mental illness or substance abuse problems. These young people develop psychosocial problems and become homeless without strong predictors from their family background. Amongst the young shelter users from families with severe social problems a higher share are in the Not in Education, Employment or Training group. They also have more shelter stays, compared to young shelter users from families with fewer social problems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents results from the first phase of a longitudinal qualitative study of gambling among young people in Denmark. The longitudinal study is designed to capture the trajectories of young gamblers and to explore how social and cultural factors and processes impact on young people's gambling careers. The first stage of analysis places a special emphasis on young people's introduction to gambling and the social contexts of these early gambling experiences. Theoretically, this first study is guided by a symbolic interactionist approach. We conclude that early experiences with gambling are socially mediated and that significant social contexts such as the family and peer groups form important contexts of these early experiences. Our evidence suggest that becoming engaged in gambling is a social process involving a transfer of skills and knowledge in which novices learn how to play and to attribute specific meanings to gambling. Overall, our findings indicate that young people start gambling not because of purely individual characteristics or deviant motivations but through social processes within significant social networks. Implications for prevention and further research are briefly discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]