Rachel Thomson

Hindsight, foresight and insight: The challenges of longitudinal qualitative research

This paper describes a UK based longitudinal qualitative study following approximately 100 young people over 9 years. It provides an overview of the research design, methods of data collection and analysis as well as reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of the strategies employed. We focus on the value of a devolved research design, complementary cross-section and temporal analytic approaches and the effects of being involved in a longitudinal study on researchers and participants. The paper aims to contribute to a growing understanding of the practical, ethical and epistemological challenges presented by longitudinal qualitative methods, and highlights those challenges that are specific to this method as well as those which are amplified by this kind of approach.

Inventing adulthoods: a biographical approach to understanding youth citizenship

Traditionally adulthood and citizenship have been synonymous. Yet adulthood is changing. In this paper we explore how young peoples evolving understandings of adulthood may contribute towards an understanding of citizenship within the broader context of increasingly extended and fragmented transitions. The paper draws on a unique qualitative longitudinal data set in which 100 young people, from contrasting social backgrounds in the United Kingdom, have been followed over a five-year period using repeat biographical interviews. We present first the themes that emerged from a cross-cut analysis of the first of three rounds of interviews distinguishing between relational and individualised understandings of adulthood. We then present a model we developed to capture the ways that young people sought out opportunities for competence and recognition in different fields of their lives. Finally a case study that follows a young woman through her three interviews illustrates how these themes can appear in an individual trajectory. We offer the model and case study as a way of exploring a more subjective approach to citizenship in which participation is not deferred to some distant future in which economic independence is achieved, but is understood as constantly constructed in the present.

Making Modern Mothers

What does motherhood mean today? Drawing on interviews with new mothers and intergenerational chains of women in the same family, this exciting and timely book documents the transition to motherhood over generations and time. Exploring, amongst other things, the trend to later motherhood and the experience of teenage pregnancy, a compelling picture emerges. Becoming a mother is not only a profound moment of identity change but also a site of socio-economic difference that shapes womens lives.

Pleasure, pressure and power: Some contradictions of gendered sexuality

The AIDS epidemic has encouraged public discussion of safer sex, but heterosexual young women have to negotiate sexual relationships with men in situations in which sex is defined largely in terms of mens needs and which lack notions of a positive female sexuality or female desires. Analysis of data from the Women, Risk and AIDS Project is interpreted to show both the range of pressures on young women to engage in sexual practices which are risky, violent or not pleasurable, but also the possibilities for young women to empower themselves in sexual relationships. Womens control over sexual safety is undermined by the dominance of male sexuality and womens compliance in satisfying mens desires. Empowerment is a contradictory and contested process requiring both critical reflection (intellectual empowerment) and the transforming of sexual experiences (experiential empowerment), but some young women are able to put into practice ways of negotiating safe and pleasurable sexual encounters with men.

Deconstructing virginity - young people's accounts of first sex

In their first (hetero)sexual experience, young people are enticed into the gendered practices, meanings and power relations of heterosexuality. This paper draws on findings from two primarily qualitative studies of young peoples sexual practices and understandings: the Women, Risk and AIDS Project and the Men, Risk and AIDS Project. The paper suggest that for young men, first (hetero)sex is an empowering moment through which agency and identity are confirmed. For young women the moment of first (hetero)sex is more complicated, and their ambivalent responses to it are primarily concerned with managing loss. By exploring and contrasting young peoples accounts of their first sexual experiences and the meanings that virginity hold for them, the paper reveals the asymmetry of desire, agency and control within (hetero)sex. The paper concludes by considering the implication of these findings for practice.

Power and Desire: The Embodiment of Female Sexuality

In recent years the study of the body has blossomed from a neglected area of social science to a focus of attention from feminists and others (e.g., Turner, 1984; Featherstone etal. 1991, Sawicki, 1991; Shilling, 1991; Scott and Morgan, 1993). Recently, feminists have been attracted to the work of Foucault and others which emphasizes that although physical bodies exist, bodies are primarily social constructions (e.g., Bordo, 1988). Looking on the bodies which engage in sexual activities as socially constructed has been a very productive way of thinking about how femininity and masculinity can be inscribed on the body. It has seemed to offer an escape from the trap of seeing sex as essentially biological. Feminists, however, have disagreed quite profoundly on how to take account of the physicality or embodiedness of social encounters (Ramazanoglu, 1993). There has been a tendency to associate any sense of bodies as material with a naive biological essentialism. This has pushed feminist theorists away from thinking about sex as both a gendered and an embodied experience, in which female embodiment differs from male embodiment (Bartky, 1990:65). The perceived opposition between essentialism and poststructuralism perpetuates a conceptual dualism between a natural, essential, stable, material body and a shifting, plural, socially constructed body with multiple potentialities. We do not have space to explore the debates over essentialism, but Fuss usefully points out that theories of the social construction of female sexuality do not escape the pull of essentialism: one can talk of the body as matter without assuming that matter has a fixed essence (1989:5, 50). In this paper we argue that there is no simple conceptual dualism which allows us to distinguish the material, biological, female body from the social meanings, symbolism and social management of the socially

The Qualitative Longitudinal Case History: Practical, Methodological and Ethical Reflections

This paper describes the development of ‘case histories’ from a qualitative longitudinal data set that followed 100 young people’s transitions to adulthood over a ten year period. The paper describes two stages in the analytic process: first, the forging of a case history from a longitudinal archive and second, bringing case histories into conversation with each other. The paper emphasises two aspects of a qualitative longitudinal data set: the longitudinal dimension that privileges the individual case, and the cross sectional dimension that privileges the social and the spatial context. It is argued that both aspects should always be kept in play in analysis. The paper concludes by reflecting on the ethical and practical challenges associated with the case history approach, heightened by the growing demand to archive and share qualitative longitudinal data sets.

Moral Rhetoric and Public Health Pragmatism: The Recent Politics of Sex Education

Sex education seems to be an inherently problematic area of social policy, highlighting as it does tensions both within and between political traditions. The controversy that surrounds the development of policy in this area is testament to the complex interplay of political ideologies that signifies the boundaries of state intervention. School sex education, along with law on abortion and censorship, mark the political front line between the personal and the public. For libertarians this line falls between the individual and the state, for moralists, between the state and the family and for paternalists between the individual and the public good. Yet sex education is not only about the boundaries of state intervention, it is also a gendered debate. The political tensions that have shaped the development of sex education policy are rooted in the ways in which governments have responded or refused to respond to changes in the structure of the family and sexual relations. Sex education is potentially a vehicle for social engineering par excellence, be it progressive or traditional. Yet paradoxically, in an age of socio-sexual change and life-threatening sexually transmitted diseases, it is also a right and an entitlement. Sex education not only brings into focus tensions around gender, but also tensions around generation and the public acknowledgement of adolescent sexuality. Current debates around the age of consent for gay men and access to contraceptive advice for under-16s illustrate the ambiguity of the role of the law in this area. In this essay I will trace the evolution of contemporary sex education policy in England and Miales, focusing on the recent development of sex education policy from Thatcherism to the 1993 Education Act. In particular I will explore how tensions between education and health, between central and delegated control and between social authoritarianism and public health pragmatism have interacted to

Between cosmopolitanism and the locals: mobility as a resource in the transition to adulthood

How useful is the distinction between cosmopolitans and locals in understanding the place of mobility and travel within contemporary youth transition? In this article we draw on a qualitative longitudinal study of young people in the UK, suggesting that localities have their own particular economy of mobility, operating at levels of the material, cultural and fantasy. In different localities young people are tied to the immediacy of physical and social space to differing degrees, and factors such as ethnicity, gender, sexuality and social class are significant in this. We illustrate and explore these themes through two longitudinal case histories in order to see how resources and agency are animated in practice. We conclude by arguing against the use of fixed typologies, suggesting that young people are torn between competing forces in relation to notions of home, tradition and fixedness on one hand and of mobility, escape and transformation on the other. The ways in which these tensions are negotiated at the biographical level are firmly embedded in gendered projects of self, through which young people work towards the kinds of men and women that they will be, drawing on family, community and cultural resources in the process.

“Thanks for the memory”: memory books as a methodological resource in biographical research

The article describes the evolution of the ‘memory book’, an innovative method for biographical research. In the first part of the article, we explain the origins of the method, tracing our own journey from conducting memory work as a research group to the creation of memory books as a method to be used alongside interviews in a longitudinal qualitative study of young people’s transitions to adulthood. In the second part of the article, we map the form and content of memory books generated in the study, commenting on issues of audience and privacy. In the final part of the article, we discuss how we used the memory book data, distinguishing between their function as sources of documentation, resources for elaboration and critical tools for the understanding of identity. The article draws attention to the potential for the method to bring embodiment and the visual dimensions into a method dominated by text and discourse, as well as facilitating the expression of a range of ‘voices’ and time frames which complicate cohesive narrative presentations of self.