Journal of Youth Studies 

About: Journal of Youth Studies is an academic journal published by Taylor & Francis. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Youth studies & Politics. It has an ISSN identifier of 1367-6261. Over the lifetime, 1432 publications have been published receiving 43772 citations.

Rethinking the Youth Phase of the Life-course: The Case for Emerging Adulthood?

Abstract: A whole flurry of new thinking and research about young people in the USA has been stimulated by Jeffery Arnett's theory of ‘Emerging Adulthood’. This argues for recognition of a new stage of the life-course between adolescence and adulthood reflecting the extension of youth transitions to independence brought about by globalization and technological change. Although the perspective aligns with developmental psychology's conception of ‘stages of development’, its appeal extends across the social science disciplines and policy domains. However, the rich theorizing of the same manifestations of social change in young people's experience in European Youth Studies appear to have been largely overlooked by Arnett. This paper attempts to redress this balance by drawing into the framework of Emerging Adulthood a wider set of theoretical concerns with structural factors and exclusion mechanisms to which (late) modern youth are subjected. The argument is exemplified by age-30 cohort comparisons across three Britis...

Changes in the transition to adulthood in the UK and Canada: the role of structure and agency in emerging adulthood

Abstract: This paper picks up from Bynner's recent critique of the current formulation of emerging adulthood as presented in his recent exchange with Arnett in the Journal of Youth Studies (2005, volume 8(4) and 2006, volume 9(1)). It pays particular attention to the exclusion processes in education and the workplace that prevent young people in some socio-economic contexts from experiencing the developmental processes presumed to be of benefit to all ‘emerging adults’. In addition, an alternative to Arnett's psychological, free-choice model of emerging adulthood is offered that identifies the social and economic conditions that have produced the prolonged transition to adulthood. We argue that this hiatus in the life-course, which is increasingly referred to as emerging adulthood, can be better explained in terms of changing economic conditions leading to a lowering of the social status of the young that is contributing to increasingly precarious trajectories, and in terms of the decline in the social markers of a...

‘I Don't Want to Commit Myself Yet’: Young People's Life Concepts

Abstract: In modem times, the human biography has become a project and the status of adolescents and young adults has changed. Young people do not automatically grow up within a framework which makes their biography a ‘normal’ adult biography, but instead, youth and adulthood acquire new varieties of significance for the subjects. Both the structure and the content of status passages in the life-course are affected by these changes. Status passages have changed structurally, they show a tendency towards synchronicity instead of linearity and have become reversible. Adolescents and young adults develop life concepts and attempt to direct the content and complexity of their lives: at the same time, they are forced to adapt to the constantly changing demands of their environment (especially the labour market). They have to take advantage of training and labour market opportunities, but must also combine these choices with decisions about personal matters so as to develop well-organized life concepts. ‘I don't...

Taking control of their lives: agency in young adult transitions in England and the new Germany

Abstract: The present article provides an overview of findings from the UK Economic and Social Research Council's Youth Citizenship and Social Change Project on how young adults experience control and exercise agency in differing socioeconomic environments. The research builds on previous Anglo-German and UK studies (Bynner & Roberts, 1991; Evans & Heinz, 1994; Evans et al ., 2000), which have contrasted the regulated German and unregulated British approaches to transitions into the labour market. In the present new study, the ways in which social changes have impacted on the lives of individuals have been central to the rationale. The Eastern and Western parts of Germany shared a common culture but operated totally different socioeconomic systems during communism. West Germany and Britain had different versions of the same socioeconomic system, but different cultural histories. Britain and Eastern Germany have experienced, from different starting points, strong effects of market forces and deregulation of previous...

Generation, Youth and Social Change in Australia

Abstract: This article takes recent critiques of the conceptualisation of ‘youth as transition’ and explores the extent to which ‘generation’ offers a more effective way of conceptualising youth. There is an identifiable convergence of evidence for a ‘post-1970’ generation who have shaped a ‘new adulthood’. Yet current approaches inevitably identify education, work and family patterns of young people's lives as evidence of their faulty, failed transitions, measured against the standard of the previous generation. A focus on generation shifts the emphasis from the assumption of linear development in which youth is a phase towards adulthood, to locate young people within the political, economic and cultural processes that both frame and shape their generation, and the meaning and experience of ‘youth’ in distinctive and enduring ways. In addition to traditional measures of patterns of life, we argue that young people's subjectivities provide an insight into their active participation in and shaping of change processe...