Social identity and alcohol in young adolescence: the perceived difference between youthful and adult drinking

This paper examines the evolving social identities of young adolescents in regard to alcohol and drinking culture in Norway. Detailed analysis of 29 focus group interviews and 32 individual interviews with 12–13-year-olds reveal a thorough negative attitude towards alcohol, especially when enjoyed by young people. Young adolescents found young people to be too irresponsible and immature to drink, while adults were portrayed as capable of enjoying alcohol without losing control or experiencing other negative effects. Through symbolic boundary work, they distanced themselves from adolescents who drank. The young adolescents rejected the idea that drinking alcohol was a sign of maturity; instead, they exhibited maturity by distancing themselves from drunk adolescents. We discuss how these findings reflect the participants’ socio-cognitive development, and how symbolic boundaries are often drawn against those closest in social distance. We conclude that boundaries between ‘adolescents’ and ‘adults’ are fundamental when understanding emerging adolescent social identities, especially when it comes to drinking and drinking culture.     

Ethnography and the digital fields of social media

Qualitative researchers struggle to study the transient fields of social network sites like Twitter through conventional ethnographic approaches. This paper suggests that, in order to step further, we should distinguish between the relatively stable ‘contextual’ fields of bounded online communities and the fluid, ‘meta-fields’ resulting from the aggregation of scattered communicative contents based on their metadata. Both these two intertwined layers of the digital environment interplay with users’ online social practices – which are embedded within offline everyday life and vice versa. While Internet ethnography largely dealt with contextual digital fields, recent developments in the realm of online research allow the ethnographic exploration of digital meta-fields and their publics. This shift recalls Marcus’ appeal for a multi-sited ethnography but, in fact, goes further beyond, towards a truly ‘un-sited’ ethnography. I highlight and discuss the main methodological implications of meta- and contextual fieldworks by presenting an exploratory study of European exchange students’ Facebook identities.     

The problem of social generations: a critique of the new emerging orthodoxy in youth studies

Over the previous seven years the application of a social generation paradigm or ‘theory’ has gained increasing currency as a method in analysing young people's relationship with the life course. Whilst not a new concept or approach its resurgence and reconfiguration to ‘new’ times has seen some writers positioning it as a ‘new orthodoxy’ or ‘consensus’ within youth studies. In this it is seen as providing a conceptual framework that better helps us understand the complexity of circumstances and conditions that shape youth identities in late modern society. In this paper we examine and explore the underlying assumptions and claims that are made by those advocating the social generational paradigm, raising questions and seeking further clarification on a number of key themes. We accept youth studies needs to move beyond ‘old models’ that define and understand social context as a simply a tension between ‘structure or/and agency’ or as a ‘flavour’ to social action. To conclude therefore we propose the need to have an approach that is ecological and both accepts ‘social change’ and ‘continuity’ as critical parts of the life course, one that recognises the nature and influence of power and social reproduction, especially for different social classes, in shaping the experience of being young.     

Not necessarily a place: How mobile transnational online workers (digital nomads) construct and experience ‘home’

This article adds to current research on mobile transnational online workers (digital nomads) who travel the world in search of a holistic lifestyle that balances work and leisure. Using Kannisto's (2014) and D'Andrea's (2007) work on ‘global nomads’ as a theoretical lens and Nowicka's (2007) research on mobile professionals as a guide, I discuss the multiple meanings of ‘home’ for digital nomads who stayed in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 2019. I will show that people feel at home when travelling with a loved one or by surrounding themselves with objects of emotional value. Furthermore, digital nomads create a feeling of being at home by connecting with their family via social media and video calling apps, while at the same time keeping them at a comfortable distance. Finally, some digital nomads envision an idealized ‘home base’ that is defined by social relations and not necessarily by the geography or amenities of a place.     

There are two sides to every story: young people’s perspectives of relationship issues on social media and adult responses

This paper reports on a recent research project undertaken in the UK that investigated how young people negotiate their identities and relationships online, including how they experience interventions by adults. Drawing on qualitative interviews with young people in two schools and a voluntary youth organisation in England, we argue that young people engage rather successfully in practices of self-governance. Our findings based on this sample of young people’s agentic practice and care for their peers challenge some dominant perceptions of young people’s online practices as risky and/or harmful to themselves and/or others. Furthermore we found a lack of evidence concerning the effectiveness of, and need for, interventions orientated around surveillance and zero tolerance.     

Becoming metal: narrative reflections on the early formation and embodiment of heavy metal identities

Heavy metal music has long been researched as a risk factor for youth development. Over the last decade, however, there has been a significant shift towards studies that are more sympathetic to metal fans, but still we know very little about young people’s pathways to forming metal identities. What is the allure of metal as an identity choice? What can be gained from the early embodiment of metal identities? To explore these questions, this paper reports on findings from qualitative research with metal youth in Australia that captured rich, narrative reflections on ‘becoming’ metal. The results show that metal was vitally important when participants felt vulnerable to bullying and exclusion by popular peers at school. But crucially, the young ‘metalheads’ were able to disrupt power relations at school by embodying ‘chosen’ heavy metal identities as a strategic response for countering ‘unchosen’ marginal school-based identities. The politically transformative properties of subculture at the level of the individual are revealed through ways that the metal youth, as self-described outsiders, were able to act alone to challenge dominant school norms and enter into social relationships on their own terms, protecting themselves from social threats to their mental health and well-being in the process.     

‘Society does treat me differently and that is a shame’: understandings and feelings of Britishness amongst visibly observant young Muslims

There has been increasing media and political questioning of the national loyalties and identities held by young British Muslims, with a particular focus on those seen to separate themselves through strict and religiously observant dress and lifestyles. This paper draws primarily on research focusing on the meanings of ‘Britishness’ held amongst a group of visibly observant young Muslim adults. Empirical evidence is provided to demonstrate that although these young adults demonstrated an explicit and visible sense of Muslim identity, this co-existed without any conscious conflict with their British identity. The young adults’ acknowledgement of their religious attachment developed from a positive and proactive identification with Islam rather than one in opposition or rebellion against a British identity. Therefore, in a wider context, their lives must not be analysed only through the lens of religion, dress and appearance as this has repercussions in relation to national policy formation and subsequent perceptions of wider society.     

Sexual and gender identity work on social media

How do sexual and gender minorities use social media to express themselves and construct their identities? We discuss findings drawn from focus groups conducted with 17 sexual and gender minority social media users who shared their experiences of online harms. They include people with gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, queer, asexual, non-binary, pansexual, poly, and kink (LGBTQ+) identities. We find that sexual and gender minorities face several challenges online, but that social media platforms provide important spaces for them to feel understood and accepted. We use Goffman's work to explore how sexual and gender minorities engage in ‘front region’ performances online as part of their identity work. We then turn to Hochschild's concepts of ‘feeling rules’ and ‘framing rules’ to argue that presentations of self, or front region performances, must include the role of feelings and how they are socially influenced to be understood.     

Positioning,strategizing, and charming: how students with autism construct identities in relation to disability

Contrary to views that young people with the label of autism are incapable of engaging in collective cultural practice, this article examines how they construct identities through social interactions to belong, compete, and participate. In a multi-sited ethnography of high school students with disabilities, we focused on two students as they move across contexts of school, debate team, and home. Over two years of interviews and participant observation, these students demonstrated nuanced efforts to distance themselves from the ‘autistic’ label. These acts of positioning illuminated how they negotiate identities with the knowledge their interactions shape how people perceive their participation in different contexts. By following them across informal and formal environments, we could see how they transition across multiple social worlds and appreciate the combined power these contexts have on youth identity.     

Building inclusion,maintaining marginality: how social and health services act as capital for young substance users

This paper draws on Bourdieusian concepts to examine the social mechanisms driving service ‘choices’ for marginalised young substance users. In doing so, it problematises the individualised understandings of ‘choice-making’ common in the existing literature. The paper uses interview data collected from 26 young substance users to describe the resources they bring to their service encounters, the capitals that they acquire through these interactions, and the ways in which these are mobilised within the fields in which they operate. The analysis finds that services acted as capital-building settings – participants acquired material resources and opportunities for skill-building, and they built relationships that contributed to a positive sense of identity and belonging. But the exchange potentials attached to these capitals were restricted by the logics of service fields that cast them as deficit and limited their opportunities to build productive forms of social capital. By revealing the social mechanisms behind service ‘choices’, the analysis suggests that the most effective services are those that maximise the opportunities for their young clients to build ‘weak ties’, such as with a diverse range of adults who themselves possess resources, and those that acknowledge the identities that young people already possess as rational and self-managing.     

Online ghettoes,perils or supernannies? Australian young people with chronic illness and disability challenge some moral panics about young people online

Current literature focusing on young people’s digital technology use often reflects concerns that they may live virtual lives and withdraw from locally geographically situated spaces. It assumes the existence of a split between offline and online ‘worlds’ corresponding to ‘real ‘and ‘non-real’ respectively. This article reports research findings on how young people locate new social media technologies in their daily lives with particular focus on the relationship between their online and offline experiences. The voices of the young people guided the research, which found that their social media use contradicts conventional narratives of moral panic about the alleged unreality and fearful dangers of online spaces for young people.     

User‐generated online queer media and the politics of queer visibility

In this article, we review sociological research on the politics of queer self‐presentation and visibility in user‐generated online media, such as personal homepages, blogs, YouTube vlogs, and queer‐specific social networking sites. Using an intersectional lens to attend to multiple axes of identity, the review offers a deeper understanding of how online queer media impact self‐presentation and visibility, while also privileging certain racial, sexual, and gender identities and practices over others. Online platforms can serve as spaces of resistance wherein queer people not only make themselves visible but also redefine dominant conceptions of identity, as well as the boundaries between public and private life. However, our review also finds that online spaces of queer self‐presentation often become another space for the reinforcement of dominant norms pertaining to various axes of one's identity. Given that the advent of user‐generated media and the Internet has facilitated the mobilization of queer people worldwide, an understanding of queer self‐presentation in online media demonstrates how new iterations of sex, gender, and sexuality are constructed in a technological era by queer‐identified people themselves, and how people can both resist and reify dominant social hierarchies across boundaries of space and time.     

Strangers are friends I haven't met yet: a positive approach to young people's use of social media

This article reports on a recent research project undertaken in the UK that investigated young people's use of a range of prominent social media tools for socialising and relationship building. The research was conducted by a way of online survey. The findings suggest that this sample of British young people's socialising and relationship-building practices via the range of prominent social media tools reflect similar behavioural categories used offline. The use of these social media tools provides young people with an opportunity to manage, simultaneously, different categories of relationships in a multiplicity of ‘spaces’ created by these tools. The findings challenge the widely held belief that young people expose themselves to risk on social media as they indiscriminately befriend strangers. There is an absence of evidence of ‘unjustified’ intent to harm others. Indeed the findings indicate a strong desire to primarily support and protect those with whom relationships have been carefully established. The research suggests in fact that online engagement through social media can be positive and constructive for young people. It appears to provide them with a challenging ‘space’ to practice identity and relationship management strategies.     

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.     

Smartphone and social media addiction: Exploring the perceptions and experiences of Canadian teenagers

“Addiction” to internet‐connected technology continues to dominate media discourses of young people. Researchers have identified negative outcomes, including decreased mental health, resulting from anxieties related to technology, e.g., a fear of missing out and social connectivity related to online technologies. Not enough is known, however, regarding young people's own responses to these ideas. This paper highlights discussions with teenagers around the idea of internet addiction, exploring their experiences and perceptions regarding the idea that “kids today” are addicted to their devices, especially smartphones and the social network sites they often access from them. Thirty‐five focus group discussions with 115 Canadian teenagers (aged 13–19 years old) center on their use of information communication technologies, especially contemporary social network sites such as Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook. Our discussions reveal (1) that teens are actively embracing the label of addiction; (2) their ironic positioning occurs despite a felt sense of debased agency in relation to the power of the algorithms and affordances of the technologies mediating their use; and (3) rather than a stark divide between adults as “digital immigrants” versus young people as “digital natives,” our teens positioned themselves in contrast to both their parents and younger siblings, both of whom are criticized as addicted themselves. A consistent theme is the influence of peer groups who socially compel addictive behaviours, including the fear of missing out, rather than the technologies per se. Wider implications for thinking beyond solely young people as suffering from online addiction are considered.     

Constructing citizenship at the margins: the case of young graffiti writers in Melbourne

Young people engaging in graffiti are often portrayed as the anti-thesis of the ‘good citizen’. As politicians and the media fight the ‘war on graffiti’, these young people are tagged as criminals and misfits, overlooking the ways this arts practice reclaims their ability to tell stories and unhinge traditional ways of practicing citizenship. Using ideas from Michelle Fine et al.’s social psychology of spatiality as a conceptual lens, this paper explores the tensions, contradictions and binaries these young people find themselves caught between, particularly; art or vandalism, professional or amateur, artist or criminal, and legitimate or illegitimate citizens as young people and transgressors of ‘normal behaviour’ in public spaces. Using multiple methods, including ‘hanging out’ and participatory visual methods, this study explores how young graffiti artists’ experiences in and out of a legal ‘street art’ programme, speak back to ‘normative’ conceptualisations of citizenship. Their experiences of differential belonging and contested citizenship, which are played out in public spaces (and beyond), highlight the importance of alterative arts programmes and the creation of sanctioned spaces in negotiating young people’s ‘right to the city’.     

Religious Identity and Family Ideologies in the Transition to Adulthood

This article examines how religion shapes family ideologies in young adulthood. Using the 31‐year Intergenerational Panel Study of Parents and Children (N= 909), we find relationships between mother’s religious characteristics when her child was born and the child’s own family ideologies in young adulthood. Further, multiple dimensions of young adults’ religious identities are independently related to their family ideologies, suggesting unique influences of both religious service attendance and the importance of religion. Our results vary across time and family ideologies in interesting patterns, but relationships between religion and attitudes are remarkably consistent. From early in life, mothers’ and children’s religious characteristics shape family ideologies in ways likely to help explain relationships found between religion and family behaviors.     

Youth Jury Policy Deliberation: Towards a Fair and Responsible Internet

Young people aged between 12 and 17 across three major British cities — London, Leeds and Nottingham — were invited to play the role of ‘jurors’ on a case where ‘the Internet was put on trial’. The recommendations reported in this paper are intended to improve digital experience and online safety as contributions to policy. These recommendations derive from the ‘youth jurors’ policy deliberations designed to encourage young people to reflect on their digital experience and collectively develop their own problem definitions and solutions.     

Being alone or becoming lonely? The complexity of portraying ‘unaccompanied children’ as being alone in Sweden

Research has largely focused on ‘unaccompanied minors’ as a vulnerable group at risk of developing psychological problems that affect their health. Separation from primary caregivers is considered one of the foremost reasons for these young people’s proposed loneliness. Thus, the official and ascribed identity is that they are lonely and that loneliness is their major problem. But research has seldom given the young people themselves an opportunity to express their views in an attempt to trace the often situational, dynamic and complex nature of social and emotional life. The present article analyses how ‘unaccompanied minors’ talk about everyday life and themes related to loneliness. The authors followed 23 ‘unaccompanied minors’ during a period of a year through ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews. Results: Loneliness may occur when these young people experience lack of control in managing life and when they feel no one grieves for them; loneliness may be dealt with by creating new social contacts and friends; loneliness may be reinforced or reduced in encounters with representatives from ‘the system’; the young people may experience frustration about being repeatedly labeled ‘unaccompanied’ and they may create a resistance to and critical reflexivity towards this labeling.     

Social Constructions of Young Children in ‘Special’, ‘Inclusive’ and Home Environments

The paper tells of the social constructs surrounding young children with learning difficulties in their home, ‘special’ early education setting and ‘inclusive’ or mainstream early education setting in England. The exploratory study focused on how three‐ to four‐year‐old children made sense of their environments and how their identities were constructed by different parties in the different contexts. Ethnographic case studies were conducted using semi‐structured and informal interviews with parents and practitioners, documentary analysis, fieldnotes, and live and video observations. Shared constructions across the contexts for each child were common, with constructions of them being happy and making progress pervasive across the children and settings. Differences in constructions across settings indicated that qualities could shine or negative constructions be tempered, thus showing the role of the environment and the culture of inclusion in socially constructing children with special needs.