Sheila Henderson

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.

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.

Making the Long View: Perspectives on Context from a Qualitative Longitudinal (QL) Study

Questions of context and reflexivity have been central to recent debates about the archiving and re-use of qualitative data but these questions have been understood in different ways. In this paper, we suggest that our experiences of attempting to analyse, interpret, write-up and, more recently, archive the (prospective and retrospective) biographical data we have collected over the decade 1996–2006, can shed useful light on these questions. First, we consider the lack of analytical closure involved in QL research, the habit of constant re-contextualisation and the complex understandings of time we formed as a consequence, arguing that, whilst qualitative data may be historically embedded and subjective, it can never be understood as being ‘out of time’ or ‘beyond the reach’ of the same or other researchers. In the QL context, the researcher becomes a subject of the research and, as such, a form of researchers reflexivity is required that recognises movement and contingency in all aspects of analysis, interpretation and representation. Then we outline how the understanding of time that emerged over the period of our research: - biographical, historical and research time – provided us with a useful conceptual framework for re-contextualising our study in the form of an archive.

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).