Young consumer identity in a restrictive school environment — Addictive substances,symbolic goods and consumer skills

For young people, consuming is an act of constructing identity, where goods, services and styles are important parts of signifying who they are. Our study focuses on young people who are living in restrictive environments, such as special boarding schools. They have been placed there because of social and educational reasons. Although aspects of education and health of young people in out-of-home care have been studied, their consumer behavior has been given limited attention. Our study shows that young people openly report the use of addictive substances such as cigarettes, alcohol, drugs as well as gambling. They also build up their consumer identity by appreciating symbolic goods, such as clothes, music and sport. Spending on expensive clothes serves their favorable self-image. The fact that the schools provide all their essential needs makes the learning of consumer skills challenging although the schools reinforce management skills such as planning the use of money. Young people struggle with their identities at the borders of their school environment (i.e. education, school discipline) and the temptations of consumer culture. Even if they manage to break their damaging life path, they will be consumers throughout their life, meaning their consumer skills need to be strengthened by special education.     

The Turkish and Moroccan Second Generation in the Netherlands: Divergent Trends between and Polarization within the Two Groups1

This article examines the socioeconomic and sociocultural status of the second‐generation Turkish young people in the Netherlands, comparing them to their Moroccan counterparts. The comparative perspective can better highlight the characteristic features of the Turkish second generation. The educational status of both the Turkish and the Moroccan young people is still weak, especially by comparison with their ethnic Dutch peers. The obstacles that second‐generation migrants encounter in their educational careers are many and diverse, and these derive both from inside their own groups and from institutional structures and other forces in Dutch society. Among the latter has been the delay in introducing professional second‐language training, which resulted in Dutch language deficiencies and poor primary school achievements. This, in combination with early school selection mechanisms at age 12, has consigned the vast majority of second‐generation children to short, dead‐end lower vocational or secondary school tracks. Unemployment is extremely high among the second‐generation migrants with short educational tracks, and discrimination in the labor market hits this group especially hard. Despite all this, the number of second‐generation young people who have succeeded in getting a better education is growing, and they are now well equipped to seek employment. An important factor in their success has been the mutual help and support they have received from family and community networks.     

Civic life in Gray Mountain: sizing up the legacy of New England’s blue-collar middle class

When President Clinton took Congressional and business leaders on a tour early this summer to places where chronic poverty has persisted despite the nation’s booming economy, they visited Appalachia’s coalfields, the Mississippi Delta, the Pine Ridge Indian reservation and inner-city neighborhoods in East St. Louis and Los Angeles. They did not visit New England. Not that New England’s inner cities aren’t plagued with poverty and social problems; they are. And many poor families are struggling to get by in rural Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Yet the notoriously bad conditions that took the president to the nation’s “poverty pockets” are exceedingly rare in the six-state region. Why? Why have poverty rates stayed so high in the South compared with New England? And what can the region expect in the future?The answers lie in the kind of civic culture generated by each community’s economy and social structure. Chronically poor places are divided by race and class and saddled with corrupt politics, ineffective schools, and self-interested elites. Distrustful of one another, people in these places look out only for their own families. Escaping poverty is possible only for the lucky few who have a kind relative, caring teacher, or coach who pushes and inspires them to finish school and aim high. But most stay trapped in the same poor conditions their parents and perhaps grandparents knew.In contrast, when communities have a large middle class, the poor are less likely to be cut off from the mainstream. And they are more likely to have the set of contacts, habits and skills—the cultural tool kit—they need to leave poverty behind. More importantly, the community institutions that poor families rely upon are more likely to be effective because the middle class is committed to them. The poor can get ahead without relying solely on personal intervention from a mentor or other benefactor.During the 1990s, I studied poverty and community change in three remote, rural communities: a poor Appalachian coal county I call “Blackwell,” a poor Mississippi Delta plantation community I call “Dahlia” and a more stable and economically diverse northern New England mill community, “Gray Mountain.” The idea was to learn why poverty persisted generation after generation in Appalachia and the Delta, what made the difference when people did achieve upward mobility, and why it was so hard to bring about change. I examined 100 years of Census data detailing changes in population, patterns of work, income distribution and education. I read histories of each region, as well as the local weekly newspapers. But the heart of the study is the 350 in-depth interviews colleagues and I conducted with people living in these communities—not only the poor, but also the rich and those in between. These open-ended conversations revealed how each community’s civic culture—its level of trust, participation and investment—shapes opportunities for both individual mobility and social change.     

Social Class and Political Engagement in the United States

The relationship between class and political engagement in the United States is well‐established: people with lower incomes, who have less education, or who work outside the professional and managerial occupations do less of all forms of political engagement. They vote less than better‐off people, are less likely to give money to candidates, pay less attention to politics, and contact their representatives less often than those with more resources. They are also less likely to believe they can influence political decisions or to feel entitled to participate in politics. This article reviews the dominant (individualist and institutionalist) approaches to explaining inequalities in political participation and highlights recent “relational” work that offers a more integrated perspective on political engagement and class position.     

Greater involvement of people living with HIV/AIDS in South Africa

This study reports on a pilot project, the greater involvement of people living with HIV/AIDS Workplace Model, which places trained fieldworkers living openly with HIV/AIDS in selected partner organisations sectors, where they set up, review or enrich workplace policies and programmes. The project adds credibility to partners' HIV/AIDS programmes and creates a supportive environment for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) and others to speak about HIV/AIDS. Eleven men and women living with HIV, aged between 30 and 45, and with varied life experiences and education levels, shared a willingness to speak about their HIV status in their workplace. They worked in very different environments but their collective experiences showed that PLWHA can add value to workplace HIV/AIDS programmes in a way that is relevant, effective, efficient, sustainable and ethical. They made companies and communities more aware of the intense need for HIV/AIDS policies and encouraged care and support for infected and affected people.     

Lessons learned from children who have experienced homelessness: what services need to know

Children who accompany their parents or guardians during a period of homelessness make up 37% (more than one in three) of all people accessing the Supported Accommodation Assistance Program (SAAP) services. This paper describes an Australian qualitative study that explored the experiences of children who accompanied their families during periods of homelessness. It focuses particularly on what children and young people say they want from the services that they come in contact with; particularly specialised homelessness services such as housing support services and refuges. Key themes that emerged from the research include: the need for services to engage with children as individuals in their own right, to listen to and acknowledge their stories, to have services that meet their individual needs, to act and respond when children feel unsafe and for workers who can provide support to children to talk to parents about what is going on. Children and young people wanted workers to know that they felt their parents were doing their best to keep them safe. They focused on what their parents could do and did do rather than what they were not able to provide. They called on the human service system to do the same.     

Economic Well-being and Ageing: The Need for Financial Education for Social Workers

This paper explores the importance of financial education for social workers who are often working with individuals and families who are financially vulnerable and who frequently have little financial knowledge. This may be particularly relevant in light of the recent global recession and the negative impact this has had for many in terms of increased living costs and decreased income. Older people may be particularly vulnerable to the economic fluctuations caused by the recession, yet they may be disadvantaged further by poor understanding of the impact of finances on well-being from social care agencies, and a paucity of information and advice to enable them to develop improved financial literacy. This may be compounded further by increasingly strict eligibility criteria, which restrict access to services, leading to increasing numbers of older people who need to fund their own care. The objective of this paper is to highlight the need for students and practitioners to develop their own financial literacy skills so as to better enable them to support those that they work with. The discussion considers the usefulness of the ‘asset vulnerability framework’ devised by Moser in assessing the economic well-being of older people and its applicability within social work education and practice.     

Expanding the pathway to postsecondary success: how recuperative back-on-track schools are making a difference

Districts and states that have begun to get traction in improving their graduation rates are pursuing a reform agenda that includes both the redesign of failing high schools and the development of multiple alternative pathways that help young people get back on track to graduation and to postsecondary education. Unlike traditional alternative education, new back-on-track models assume that challenge, not remediation, will make the most difference, especially for youth who are over age for grade and far behind in accumulating the credits they need. The goal is for students to make up for lost time by accelerating their learning so that they can complete high school and move successfully to postsecondary education and careers. Although these small schools do not in themselves constitute a replacement or transformation strategy for large low-performing high schools, they are a necessary part of a comprehensive approach to turning such schools around.     

Cultures in Contact: Deaf and Hearing People

Despite their relative invisibility, deaf people have a well established position in our special education and social services. They are a group to be cared for. Yet they have not always been like that nor do we believe they should be seen only in this light. This paper examines how social pressures have acted on deafness in work, in education, in the professionalisation of services, have impinged on deaf people themselves, and have created a misunderstood and under-estimated minority. We consider the current situation of deaf people in terms of their lack of power, the new emergence of their language and culture and the use of signing in education. All of these aspects highlight the need to reconsider our treatment of deaf people and the paper encourages some self-examination of professional roles.     

Mental illness, supported education, employment and recovery: Ben's story

Supported education programs aim to facilitate the successful return to higher education for people living with mental illness who may have experienced educational interruptions due to their illness. This article shares the story of Ben who lives with mental illness and his experience of participating in an Australian supported education course. The two authors draw on a qualitative life history approach as they reflected on Ben's experiences of mental illness, educational disruption and returning to education and employment. The losses associated with educational disruption and the positive and empowering experience of becoming a student again are described as positively impacting recovery. Ben's story is shared in anticipation that other people living with mental illness, their family and carers, or workers supporting those people, may draw from his determination and success, in their own journeys of recovery.     

The outcomes of a longitudinal study of non‐organic failure‐to‐thrive

Individuals who had failed‐to‐thrive for non‐organic reasons received psychosocial intervention which was tailor‐made to their particular needs during childhood. Their progress was followed up over 20 years later, including their physical growth and social and cognitive functioning. Not all clients showed the same outcomes. The quality of the parental relationship and the reason for the growth‐faltering were found to be related to the outcomes at 20 years. Unless they experienced a positive and sustained change in their life or circumstances, individuals who had experienced abuse showed poorer outcomes than those whose growth‐faltering had been thought due to neglect, lack of parenting or feeding dif?culties. Abuse tended to be a contributing factor to growth‐faltering more frequently in families where the parents were observed to have a poor relationship with each other. However, a signi?cant change in the quality of care given to the child and the emotional environment experienced by them resulted in positive outcomes 20 years later despite experiencing abuse during childhood. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Staying inside: social withdrawal of the young,Finnish ‘Hikikomori’

This article explores socially withdrawn young Finnish people on an Internet forum who identify with the Japanese hikikomori phenomenon. We aim to overcome the dualism between sociology and psychology found in earlier research by referring to Pierre Bourdieu, who provides insights into how individual choices are constructed in accordance with wider social settings. We focus on the individual level and everyday choices, but we suggest that psychological factors (anxiety, depression) can be seen as properties of social relations rather than as individual states of mind, as young adults have unequal access to valued resources. We scrutinise young people’s specific reasoning related to the social and psychological factors and contingent life events that influence their choice to withdraw. An experience of inadequacy, a feeling of failure and a lack of self-efficacy are common experiences in the data. This indicates that young adults who identify with the hikikomori phenomenon find external society demanding and consider themselves lacking resources such as education, social networks or the personality type that they see as valued in society and as essential to ‘survival’. They also feel that they cannot control their life events, which may mean that they receive little help in their everyday lives.     

Negotiating the New Market: Women,Families, Women’s Organizations and the Economic Transition in Poland

Women have been affected more negatively than men by the economic transformation in Poland. They are the majority of the unemployed and the poor, they have a more difficult time finding jobs, and their incomes are significantly lower than mens. The disadvantageous position of women on the labor market, coupled with increasing governmental withdrawal from social provisioning like childcare, health care, and education, has created problems for families, especially for growing numbers of single mothers and two-parent low-income families. The transition to a market economy also has generated a steady growth of womens organizations which have stepped in where the state has withdrawn from social provisioning and provide assistance to women and their families. These organizations are not only helping women and low-income families adjust to the new market situation, but also to negotiate the market so that it better responds to their needs.     

‘My master and Miss … warn’t nothing but poor white trash’: poor white slaveholders and their slaves in the antebellum South

While the majority of enslaved people lived on large plantations, there were a significant minority who lived on smaller farms where they and their families were the only slaves owned by their master (or mistress). This article uses 22 Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews conducted in the 1930s with former slaves from across the South to investigate the lives of enslaved people living with masters or mistresses that they described as ‘poor’, and argues that enslaved experiences on small farms owned by poor whites varied widely, but were marked particularly by violence, material deprivation, and intense loneliness.     

FROM EL CAMPO TO EL BARRIO: MEMORY AND SOCIAL IMAGINARIES IN SANTO DOMINGO

In the social imaginaries of the Dominican Republic, national culture has its origins in el campo, the countryside. Country spaces and country people are viewed as embodying the past in the present, making them authentic contemporary carriers of national culture and moral order. By contrast, the city has long been viewed as the site of a modernity that takes its inspiration from outside of the nation but also as a site of social degeneration. In recent decades, representations of poor barrios as a threat to the city's moral order have intensified in reaction to rising crime rates and a series of economic crises. First generation migrants from the country to the city find that their status as carriers of culture and morality is compromised. They evoke positive memories of their rural pasts to position themselves as moral beings transposed to a corrupt urban milieu. At the same time, they develop urban identities that incorporate aspects of rural life while rejecting others. I argue that migrants' memories of their rural past resist their emplacement while allowing for the transformation of their present structural position.     

The variation in family background amongst young homeless shelter users in Denmark

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.     

Dealing with diversity in internationalised higher education institutions

While the economic benefits created by international education export are well documented, few systematic and qualitative analysis studies have been conducted to examine how academic staff perceive the presence of international students in their institutions. Using interview data from 80 academic staff from different disciplines in one higher institution in Australia, this study examines whether the presence of international students has an impact on staff teaching practice. Some of the academic staff reported that they made no adjustments to their teaching. They treated all students as one student group. Other staff members said that there have been changes in their teaching in response to the presence of international students in their classroom. The paper discusses some of the underlying causes of these responses, and implications for the practice of international education. The discussion of the findings is informed by Bennett’s Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, which helps us understand how people respond to cultural differences.     

The Joint Effect of Poor Physical Function and Childcare on Psychological Distress Among Elderly Latinos

Abstract

This study is based on the double jeopardy hypothesis that elderly people who have poor physical function and who provide childcare for their families are more likely to experience a greater sense of psychological distress than those with poor physical function who have no childcare responsibilities. We used a sample of 2160 elderly (age 65 or over) Latinos (including Puerto Ricans and those of Mexican, Cuban, or other Latin American origin or descent) from the National Survey of Hispanic Elderly People to test this hypothesis. Regression analysis was used, and the findings confirm that after controlling for age, gender, marital status, and education, the joint effect of physical function and childcare on psychological distress remains statistically significant. We further performed a sub-group analysis, also using regression analysis, to clarify the effect of poor physicalfunction on psychological distress in the sample of those who did provide and those who did not provide childcare. The findings clearly indicate that poor physical functioning has a greater effect on psychological distress in the group who provided childcare than in the group that did not. Implications for intergenerational practice and further research are discussed.     

‘He enjoyed it more than I did’!: young British Sikh women negotiating safe sex in heterosexual encounters

ABSTRACT

Sex education and relationship strategy of the U.K. allows parents to withdraw their children from sex education, which has left many young people especially those from Black Minority and Ethnic communities with low or no sex education. Similarly, the government's policy environment enables faith schools to teach these subjects under the tenets of their faith. This empirical research was carried out in South-West London using 12 qualitative interviews with women and men (ages 18–20 years) discusses young women's experiences of their first sexual encounter who navigate their reputations, relationships as well as negotiate safe sex in the absence of appropriate relationships and sex education. Sex education not only brings into focus sensitivities around gender but also tensions around religion in the U.K. Evidence from the study suggests that despite the importance placed by the Indian community on maintaining virginity, young women asserted that religion and culture did not prohibit them from exploring their sexuality. In this study, the priority is to present young women's voices and experience of sexual encounters.     

Mainstream is not for all: the educational experiences of autistic young people

Abstract

This article highlights two current issues facing autistic young people in their pursuit of suitable education. First, mainstream education is advocated for all, from a rights-based perspective on inclusion, yet, as 12 autistic young people from Northern Ireland demonstrate, being academically able does not mean they are mainstream able. Second, autistic young people, who are largely missing from the debate on educational improvement, and in particular the inclusion debate, ought to be central to this discussion and have much to add. The social model of disability is considered relevant to autism. For the young people referred to in this article, inclusion is a feeling (a sense of belonging) not a place (mainstream or otherwise).