Representations of Youth

Representations of Youth examines the various constructions of 'youth' and 'adolescence' in recent British and North American research. Mainstream and radical approaches have presented a series of 'crises' about young people in relation to, among other things, unemployment, 'teenage pregnancy' and 'delinquency'. This book considers research in psychology, sociology, education, criminology and cultural studies in order to assess these accounts. The author offers a critical review of a wide range of findings about young people in areas as diverse as education and training, leisure, family life and sexuality. She shows that whilst youth research texts do not reflect young people's experiences in any straightforward manner, they do indicate the various complex and contradictory ways in which 'youth', 'adolescence' and specific groups of young people are represented in contemporary western societies. In so arguing, she presents new terms for thinking about the position of young people today. This is an important new text accessibly written for students of sociology, social psychology and contemporary culture in both Britain and the USA. It will also be of great interest to social science researchers in a range of other disciplines.

Acknowledgements 1. Starting Points and Reservations: A Century of Adolescence: From 1880 to 1980 2. Schooling for the Scrap-heap: Research on the 'Transition from School to Work' 3. Constructing the Crisis: The Impact of Youth Unemployment 4. Bad Boys and Invisible Girls: Youth, Crime and 'Delinquency' 5. The Threat of 'Unstructured Free Time': Young People and Leisure in the 1980s 6. Young People and the 'Private Sphere': Family Life and Sexuality 7. Recovery and Survival: Youth Research after Thatcher and Reagan Glossary References