Sheena McGrellis

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.

Pushing the boundaries in Northern Ireland: young people, violence and sectarianism

The conflict in Northern Ireland, euphemistically known as the ‘Troubles’, has since 1969 claimed more than 3500 lives, representing approximately one in every 500 of the population (1.6 million). Forty thousand people, about one in fifty, have been seriously injured and it is said that everyone in Northern Ireland has known a friend or relative killed. Young people (under 29 years) account for over half of the total deaths and 91.1% of all victims have been male. As well as gender, other factors including location, religion, age and socio-economic status have had significant influence in how people have experienced and been effected by the Troubles. The link between political violence and social and economic deprivation has been widely reported. The paramilitary ceasefires in 1994 saw a dramatic reduction in the level of ‘political’ violence in Northern Ireland. While these ceasefires have not been ‘complete’, paramilitary and sectarian violence has since then been linked largely to dissident groups, to internal paramilitary feuds, to paramilitary community ‘policing’ activity, and to localized interface violence (between communities sharing a territorial border). Such violence has claimed 167 lives since 1995 and over 2500 ‘paramilitary-style attacks’ including shootings and beatings have been reported since then. As well as the high cost in human lives, the Troubles have served to accentuate differences between the two main communities and have contributed to increased segregation through widespread population shifts. Ongoing movement and displacement has contributed to a situation where it is estimated that 50% of the population live in areas that are more than 90% Catholic or Protestant.

Pure and bitter spaces: gender, identity and territory in Northern Irish youth transitions

This paper examines young people’s narratives of space and territory and the ways in which they are gender specific. Drawing upon data from two ESRC funded research projects beginning in 1996, the paper focuses upon the ways in which boundaries are perceived, constructed and managed in the everyday lives of young women and men growing up in one area of Northern Ireland. The paper considers how the territorial boundaries that young people adhere to create ‘pure’ and ‘bitter’ spaces which serve to reinforce their own sense of cultural and ethnic differences. It also looks at the experiences of those who travel beyond these boundaries, the impact of gender and the implications that traversing boundaries has on young people’s lives. Finally, the paper suggests that young women appear more willing and able to cross boundaries by seizing opportunities presented by cosmopolitanism and changing patterns of leisure. In so doing, young women challenge the legacy of ‘bitterness’ inherent in pure spaces.

Storying qualitative longitudinal research: sequence, voice and motif

We suggest here that the analysis, interpretation and representation of qualitative longitudinal (QL) data requires methodological innovation leading to new forms of representation that elude the usual temporality of writing research. To illustrate this argument, we outline a case history method-in-process developed to condense intensive volumes of biographical data generated over 12 years, and deal with the intersection of different timescapes through which individuals move (biographical, generational, historical). We describe changing strategies for managing, analysing and representing data employed by the Inventing Adulthoods team, examining our practice in the light of key methodological issues raised by qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) and making that reflexive and collective research practice explicit.

In transition: young people in Northern Ireland growing up in, and out of, divided communities

Abstract The history of Northern Ireland has created communities that display high levels of intra-community trust and localized networking associated with ‘bonding’ social capital. Political and social changes brought about by the ‘peace process’ have created possibilities for greater inter-community contact and potential for the generation of ‘bridging’ social capital. Growing up in this period of transition, young people in the Inventing Adulthoods study have been affected by and have responded to these changes, and to the experience of sectarianism and violence, in different ways. This paper explores the biographical journeys of a small number of young people from 1996 to 2006, and considers how ethnic and territorial boundaries have shaped the social and spatial fabric of their lives. It asks to what extent and how young people growing up in spaces characterized by networks, values and social relationships that are indicative of bonding social capital, can straddle boundaries and access and generate bridging social capital.

Growing up in Northern Ireland

Young people in Northern Ireland (NI) have grown up during ‘the Troubles’1 and subsequent peace process, a period of significant political, economic and social transition. The ‘Inventing adulthood’ study has shadowed these changes since 1996. Politicians and those in positions of power and influence negotiated, renegotiated and thrashed out settlements and deals, while sectarianism and violence continued in the streets and communities where the young people lived. Ceasefires were agreed, and remained largely intact but the process of moving towards an inclusive and peaceful society was, and continues to be, delicate. The Troubles and the history of sectarian divisions and violence have had a strong impact on the lives of young people growing up in NI, colouring the ways they understand themselves, and their relationships with families, communities, friends and politics. This generation can be seen as falling between two eras (Mannheim 1952). They are children of the Troubles and at the same time the first generation to grow into adulthood in a post-ceasefire society — a society in its infancy in terms of governance, and very much at the early stages of building a shared future.

Strategies for dealing with problems associated with use of services for HIV infection and AIDS out of region: views of providers and users.

OBJECTIVES —To identify reasons why people with HIV infection and AIDS living within the former South West Thames Regional Health Authority use HIV and AIDS services outside the region, and to identify strategies for dealing with theproblems associated with such use. DESIGN —Qualitative study consisting of interviews with individual subjects and focus groups. SETTING —Providers of services for patients with HIV infection and AIDS in South West Thames, central London, and Brighton. Users of such servicesresident in South West Thames. SUBJECTS —Thirty four South West Thames residents with HIV infection and AIDS who use or usedservices outside theformer region; and 70 providers of services within and beyond South West Thames. RESULTS —Principal reasons for use of services out of the region were accessibility (15) and negative appraisals of local services (14). Three main strategies for dealing with the problems of such use were suggested by providers. These entailed introducing users of services outside the region to services in their locality (16); sharing the responsibility for care between providers in specialist centres and in the persons locality (10); and involving the persons general practitioner in their care (12). These strategies were deemed acceptable by 29, 30, and 20 service users respectively. CONCLUSION —The reasons underlying use of services for patients with HIV infection and AIDS outside the region offer suggestions for developing services in areas with a high incidence of such use. The suggestions advanced by service providers offer an acceptable framework for dealing with the problems. Key messages Various problems in provision of services can arise when a person with HIV infection or AIDS travels long distances for HIV and AIDS services The main reasons for use of HIV and AIDS services outside the region identified by a sample of South Thames (West) residents with HIV infection or AIDS were service accessibility and negative appraisals of local services To overcome the problems of such use service providers advocated encouraging people with HIV infection or AIDS to transfer their care wholly or partly to their local area Strategies for transferring and sharing care were rated as broadly acceptable -with certain provisos -by service users

Researching Childhood: Time, Memory and Method

The research from which this paper is drawn set out to document the moral landscapes of almost 2,000 young people aged 11–16 in five contrasting locations in the UK.1 One aim of the study was to develop an understanding of how social and intergenerational changes have affected the legitimacy of sources of moral authority. We were interested in how young people experience social change and how social changes are manifest in their lives and moral landscapes. At the outset of our study we consulted young people about the aims and methods of the research, exploring the meanings that they attributed to the key terms of our investigation. A clear message emerging from this consultation was that we should ask them only about things they knew. So we needed to find ways of gaining access to what they knew about their own processes of moral development and their understanding of social change. No single method was likely to resolve the conceptual and practical difficulties involved in this, and we developed a number of different approaches. In this paper we describe two of these approaches, discuss the type of data generated, and reflect on their relative success.

From ‘Peter Andre’s six pack’ to ‘I do knees’ — the Body in Young People’s Moral Discourse

The body can be understood as inherently moral, playing an important role in the creation of moral boundaries and discourse. Mary Douglas has shown how the body becomes a metaphor for a society, with ideas of dirt, disease, purity and danger serving to map moral boundaries of acceptability (Douglas 1966). While Douglas’s approach treats the body as a natural metaphor for moral order, more recent commentators have observed that the body is increasingly divorced from nature, and drawn into the realm of choice, modification and commodification. What Featherstone (1991) has called the ‘secular’ body, Shilling (1993) the ‘unfinished’ body, Fiske (1989) the ‘aestheticized body’ and Bordo (1993) the ‘plastic’ body, becomes part of the reflexive project of the self, subject to choice, aestheticizing and body-reflexive practices (Connell 1995: 59).