Elizabeth Cleaver

Researching young people's lives

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

Domesticity, Household Formation and Youth Research

This chapter provides an overview of existing treatment of the themes of young people, domesticity and household formation. Youth research has long been dominated by two main approaches: the youth cultural studies tradition and the youth transitions tradition. There are numerous accounts within the youth literature concerning the relative strengths and weaknesses of these two approaches, and we do not intend to rehearse those arguments here (see MacDonald, 1998; Cohen and Ainley, 2000; MacDonald etal., 2001; Skelton, 2002 for some recent discussions). However, for our purposes it is important to note that both have operated with clear boundaries around what is considered to be appropriate subject matter. The youth cultural studies tradition has focused on young people’s leisure and subcultural affiliations in the extra-domestic sphere to the virtual exclusion of other spheres of activity, whilst the youth transitions tradition, in principle embracing employment, housing and domestic transitions, has in practice tended to prioritise school to work transitions. The latter approach has, however, begun to take domestic and housing transitions more seriously, and we end this chapter by outlining some of the defining characteristics of existing transitions-influenced work on household formation.

Conclusion: Twenty-somethings and Household Change

This book has explored the ongoing destandardisation of patterns of household formation amongst young people in Northern Europe, Australia and the United States, with a particular focus on the United Kingdom. As such, the transitional experiences of contemporary twenty-somethings tend to be markedly different to those of their parents. We have noted that contemporary young adults are now more likely to leave home in order to continue into higher education, to return to the parental home for extended periods once having left, to experience periods of shared household and solo living arrangements alongside periods of cohabitation with opposite sex and same sex partners, and to marry and have children, if at all, at a later age and after first cohabiting with their eventual spouse. As a consequence of these developments, there is little consciousness amongst many young adults of an automatic and linear route from parental dependency to (co)dependency on a partner, even though available evidence suggests that most heterosexual young people continue to aspire to such a trajectory in the longer term.

Shared Housing, Grown-up Style

Something strange has happened in sitcom land: shared households and bedsits, stock reference points of television comedy and soap, have had a make-over. No longer peopled by lonely individuals (Rising Damp), assorted radicals and impoverished students (The Young Ones) or slackers (Men Behaving Badly), they now house groups of young professionals living affluent urban lifestyles in chic, comfortable surroundings. Today’s sitcom sharers have housemates like Friends and a This Life style to match. And The Secret Life of Us is now revealed for all to see, with 24-hour flat-sharing brought to our screens by courtesy of the Big Brother cameras. Similarly, the pages of the glossies and Sunday supplements are spreading the message that shared housing is cool; as one such article claimed, ‘It’s a positive, “I’m all right” statement’ (Robson-Scott, 1999: 47). If the media representations are to be believed, then, sharing appears to have become fashionable, a key element of a deliberate lifestyle choice among single, upwardly mobile post-adolescents.

Friends and Family

Since its launch in 2000, Friends Reunited - a website devoted to catching up with former school friends - has become one of the most popular websites in the United Kingdom. With over eight million members and about five to ten thousand new members joining every day, it has spawned rival websites and at least one spoof site, Bullies Reunited, and now sells a series of Friends Reunited ‘nostalgic music’ CDs and related merchandise. As a measure of its success, and of the simplicity of the idea underpinning it, it has now extended its coverage to other countries, including Australia and South Africa. Its popularity arguably reflects a sense of nostalgia for the straightforwardness of childhood friendship, but also reinforces what seems to be a widely held ideal concerning the increased significance of friendship within contemporary society. Such a view is similarly reinforced by the popularity of any number of friendship-based sitcoms, with the hugely popular Friends leading the way in a paean of praise to contemporary friendship. Partners and family members may, after all, let you down, but at the end of the day old friends are, as the theme tune of Friends suggests, always ‘there for you’ -and, should you have mislaid them, Friends Reunited can now help you find them.

Solo Living: Who Wants to Live Alone?

Living alone is perhaps the ultimate manifestation of individualisation, marked by access to space and time of one’s own. Whilst for some this may be perceived as a blessing and for others a curse, as a domestic arrangement it is undoubtedly in the ascendancy. In the United Kingdom, nearly twice as many individuals now live in single person households than did so in the early 1960s, rising from 4 per cent in 1961 to 12 per cent in 2001 (Office for National Statistics, 2002). An increase in solo living has similarly been noted in the United States and Australia and, as in the United Kingdom, its incidence is predicted to rise throughout the early decades of the twenty-first century, representing the most significant change in household structure during this period. Of course, living alone covers a wide variety of experience: at one extreme associated with bedsit-style accommodation in poor quality housing stock, but at the other associated with a deliberately chosen ‘urban chic’ designer lifestyle: the world of ‘loft living’ and purpose-built apartments in expensive locations. Moreover, whilst the former scenario is popularly associated with social isolation, the latter is more associated with the cultivation of an active social life within the urban playground. There is clearly a world of difference between these two extremes, and a range of experience existing in the intermediate spaces, reflecting the unequal distribution of risk and life chances amongst different groups of young people today.

Risk, Individualisation and the Single Life

In this chapter, we outline the elements of an alternative framework for exploring contemporary household formation amongst young adults. In so doing, we acknowledge the importance of the constraint model, introduced in the previous chapter, in underlining the broader structural frameworks within which young people experience household formation. However, we believe that it cannot account for the choices and experiences of all young adults, and as such provides only a partial explanation of contemporary patterns of household formation, particularly amongst ‘older’ young people. Our alternative framework is an attempt to offer a fresh perspective on processes of household formation in the light of broader social transformation. As with the constraint model, it too cannot account for the experiences of all young people, but in seeking to gain a fuller understanding of contemporary domestic and housing transitions we believe that researchers need to explore how the two models relate to each other. Successive government policies in the sphere of education, training, employment and housing, alongside adverse economic conditions affecting many young adults, have undoubtedly acted as powerful catalysts for recent demographic trends. Nonetheless, serious consideration equally deserves to be given to broader shifts within contemporary society, particularly those relating to changes in the labour market and in the life course, as well as shifting attitudes towards the politics and dynamics of contemporary relationships.

Student Housing and Households

Despite undergraduate students being a captive audience for academic researchers, it is somewhat ironic that the day-to-day experiences of students outside of the lecture room are largely overlooked within the sociology of youth. In a long overdue volume dedicated to the study of student life, Silver and Silver (1997) reflect on ‘how little research exists on students as “real people”’ (p. 2). This silence, they argue, results from the influence of policy demands, funding pressures and the growing need for institutional accountability. Education and policy researchers, while focusing on student recruitment, learning, attainment and attrition, have thus largely neglected to study student life outside of the learning environment. Indeed, reflecting on the influential Dearing Report (1997), Barnet (1998) notes a continuing ‘lack of any serious discussion of… students and what it is to be a student’ (p. 17). Most research on housing choices, household formation patterns and transitions to adulthood (within both housing studies and the sociology of youth) has equally failed to consider the experiences of undergraduate students, other than to highlight the growing importance of student accommodation as a first destination on leaving home. The reasons for this specific neglect are somewhat different to those highlighted by Silver and Silver (1997) and will be briefly considered below.

Negotiating Current and Future Partnerships

Contemporary young adults may well be spending longer periods of time living alone or with friends rather than partners, but there is little evidence to suggest that they are rejecting the pursuit of sexual relationships per se. A casual stroll down any urban high street on a Saturday night would confirm this, not to mention the proliferation of dating agencies and singles clubs all dedicated to finding the perfect partner - or at least the next partner. In 1998, nine out often 25-34-year-old Britons reported having had at least one sexual partner in the previous year, with most having had more than one (Office for National Statistics, 2000), whilst a third of never-married men aged under 35 and four in ten of their female peers claim to be in a steady relationship with someone they consider to be a partner (Ermisch, 2000). Early marriage may be going out of fashion, but sex, love and romance appear to remain high on the agenda for most twenty-somethings.

The Destandardisation of Household Formation

As we move further into the new century, we are witnessing the ongoing destandardisation of household formation amongst young adults. In a relatively short space of time, and across Europe, Australia and North America, patterns of movement in and out of a variety of living arrangements have been radically transformed. It is now commonplace to refer to the risk-strewn path to adulthood faced by contemporary youth. Former certainties of more or less linear transitions into a house and family of ones own have been displaced by a fragmentation of routes and a proliferation of possibilities. By the time they hit thirty, many young adults, having initially left the parental home, will have returned at least once. Most are likely to have experienced some form of communal living: in a hostel or hall of residence, in lodgings or bedsits, in student and non-student shared households. They may have spent time living alone, and will probably have cohabited at least once, possibly with a partner of the same sex. They may have children, with or without a live-in partner. If they have experienced marriage, they are likely to have first cohabited with their current spouse, and they face a strong possibility of subsequently experiencing divorce and remarriage, if they have not done so already. And on the breakdown of their relationships, they may move back into any one of these scenarios, at least temporarily.