At risk of what? Possibilities over probabilities in the study of young lives

Abstract

This paper draws on a series of 45 interviews with recipients of social assistance between the ages of 16 and 24 to offer a critical assessment of the language of ‘risk’ and ‘resilience.’ After briefly tracing the development of this vocabulary and approach in youth research, this paper argues in line with existing critiques (Kelly 2000, te Riele 2006, France 2007) that neither risk nor resilience is an appropriate way of coming to understand young people's past, present, or future lives. Moreover, the authors argue that the language of risk and resilience commits a form of ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu 1999, Frank 2002, Zizek 2008) against young people whose lives are presumably captured and finalized by this conceptual language. Instead, the authors propose that, when dealing with young people and the future, a focus on narrative and the ‘desirable futures’ interviewees envision for themselves is a more humane, and in many respects a more fruitful way of approaching the study of young lives.

Keywords:

• unemployment
• lifestyles
• homelessness
• exclusion
• employment

Notes

1. Note, however, that many of Hall's ideas are still explicitly used and/or expanded or reformulated (see Arnett 2006, for a discussion of the continuity between his work and contemporary work on adolescence). Moreover, Hall's thinking is implicitly there in almost all recent youth research. The very idea of youth as a distinct life stage grew out of Hall's work, and thus, the whole tradition of youth studies is irrevocably connected to his early thinking no matter how far it appears to have traveled away from that beginning.

2. In this paper, we use the ambiguous term ‘young people’ to connote the age category to which the people we spoke to belong. They are allowed access to the youth drop-in center (where our research took place) on the basis of being 24 or younger. This is the primary factor uniting them as a social group – not their so-called ‘youth,’ which varies by context and individual subjectivity. While our interviews were limited to people between the ages of 16 and 24, we see our findings as illuminating social phenomena that affect all people, especially those who find themselves at an economic or educational disadvantage when it comes to making a living.

3. In terms of social assistance, young people in this study were on either Ontario Works Social Assistance or Ontario Disability Support Program.

4. There is one important caveat regarding our findings and the way in which they will be presented below. Social scientific methods, it has been argued, do not deal well with the messiness of social life. In fact, as Law (2003, p. 3) proposes, ‘dominant approaches to method work with some success to repress the very possibility of mess.’ In contrast to the neat models the risk and resilience literature supplies us with – granted, usually accompanied by an admission of the oversimplification such models inevitably impose – we will attempt to show the mess of our findings first, and then the patterns and order discernible therein. In so doing, we hope to undermine the social scientific tendency to categorize, label, and group phenomena and people before describing the contents of such categories as though they coalesce naturally in the lives of research participants.

5. When it comes to age-related labels and discourses, studies have highlighted how terms such as ‘adolescence’ are taken up by the individuals they pertain to (Raby 2002), along with how categories such as ‘middle aged’ are confronted by people who have presumably moved into this constructed stage of life (Shweder 1998).

6. Specifically, in a section we have no room to detail here, we spoke to participants about their sense of control over the events and decisions that led them to rely on social assistance and, in many cases, live on the street or in shelters. With few exceptions, they claimed full responsibility for the things that happened and are happening in their lives. Their sense of agency, even with regard to situations and events they considered problematic or negative, was and is paramount. This opens up a dilemma for researchers, practitioners, and others looking for a way to understand the balance between what are clumsily referred to as structure and agency – while the latter is important to the young people we spoke to, highlighting it may obscure the presence, persistence, and power of structures which are truly, mostly beyond the control of individuals acting alone.

7. Indeed, many participants, responding to the question of whether they alone were responsible for the trajectories of their lives up to the present, brought up the generalized ‘other’ who blames his or her current situation on abusive parents or childhood poverty, and dismissed this as irresponsible.

8. Interviewees were encouraged to ‘tell stories,’ beginning with the story of their first job; this open style was meant to elicit narrative data. Some came easier than others, thus some required more probing questions, and those interviews took on a more semi-structured feel.

9. Problematically, in early interviews, many of which were more structured than later ones, the general question ‘Where do you see yourself/want to be in 10 years?’ came approximately 10 questions after one about intentions to go to college or university. Thus, participants might have felt compelled to include something about university or college in their imagined futures. That said, not all of them did include post-secondary education in their plans.

10. This distinction between wants and needs is admittedly arbitrary, or at least not entirely accurate. Pugh (2009) eloquently describes the connection between wants and needs with her term, ‘the alchemy of desire into need.’ Briefly, she shows how things that are in some contexts considered mere desires actually transform into needs and they become attached to a person's need for dignity. Consumer goods, such as new sneakers or electronics, transform from desires to needs as owning them props up a person's sense of self-worth, and his or her ability to connect with others who own the same things.

11. Thanks to an early reviewer (name blinded for review) for raising this point with us.

12. A third problem, one stemming not from the narrative approach but from our particular use of it, is that we have herein relied on one interview with each participant. Especially given the informal updates we heard from employees of the youth drop-in center and former participants themselves – some participants’ lives turned quite dramatically after our interviews – we are cognizant of the temporality of our findings. However, we recognize that all methods are limited by temporality, and hope that the tenor of our claims reflects this recognition.