‘Eighteen just makes you a person with certain privileges’: the perspectives of Australian Sudanese and South Sudanese youths regarding the transition to adulthood

ABSTRACT

How the transition to adulthood is understood by youths can be influenced by social context and cultural background/s. Employing a voice-centred relational methodology approach, underpinned by a framework of identity and belonging, this paper reports on one aspect of a larger qualitative study designed to better understand the transition to adulthood as experienced by Australian Sudanese and South Sudanese youths. The findings of this study suggest that the perspectives on the transition to adulthood held by participants were based on feelings of possessing certain character traits and values they associated with the identity ‘adult’. These findings are relatively consistent with previous research. Yet, the utility and value of this transition was also presented by participants as being inherently collective (i.e. to contribute within one’s community). However, several barriers relating to social belonging were identified by participants to influence, and in some instances, impede a successful transition to adulthood.

KEYWORDS:

• The transition to adulthood
• Australia
• Sudanese and South Sudanese
• belonging
• identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. As requested by community leaders, the ages of Group 1 participants were not gathered. For some youths, their ages were assigned in refugee camps and may be contestable and/or linked to traumatic events. The designator of ‘youth’ was tacitly self-assigned by participants via their self-referral into this study from youth programmes.

2. Youth participants from both sites were invited to engage in a focus group interview. All youth from S.1 volunteered to be involved in a focus group interview, whereas no youth participants from S.2 took this option. As such, a single focus group interview was conducted with S.1 youth participants. Examples of findings arising from this focus group will be explicitly differentiated from findings arising from individual interviews.

3. All names presented in this paper are pseudonyms. Pseudonyms were chosen by participants themselves.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Australian Government’s Research Training Program.