The Many Youths of Hard Times: Observing and Understanding Young People’s Biographical Troubles

Young people’s biographical trajectories and experiences of difficult moments

The genesis of this special issue was in 2020 when both editors joined the organising committee of the mid-term conference of Research Network (RN) 03 of the European Sociological Association (ESA) “Biographical Perspectives on European Societies”. The purpose of this online conference event was to initiate critical discussion and debates about opportunities and challenges for the application of biographical research methods during COVID-19 lockdowns with regards to data collection, analysis, interpretation and ethics. This initial introduction spawned further dialogues between the editors throughout 2021 about the impacts of COVID-19 on youth, and possibilities for further extending these discussions into a special issue that would capture young people’s experiences of hard times, not alone during the recent COVID-19 pandemic but also in relation to homelessness, family relationships, emotions, education and war. This special issue represents the culmination of these critical discussions amongst us as editors, with authors and with colleagues in Ireland, Portugal, the UK, Denmark and Ukraine, about ways of thinking and observing emotionally turbulent times, structural constraints and (self)care dynamics in young people’s “life histories, lived situations and personal experiences” (Wengraf, 2011, p. 1).

The term “hard times” itself, potentially at the origin of biographical crises (Caetano, 2021), is multidimensional, and the process of conducting depth research with youth experiencing difficult moments, be it emotionally, physically or financially (or indeed, all three simultaneously), is ethically challenging and is frequently a sensitive and emotionally fraught process for researchers. The meaning of hard times as applied to young people’s lives is contextual and temporal; pejoratively speaking, it evokes Dickensian overtones of brutalised childhoods and adolescence, while for sociologists it frequently connotes economic hardships (Lim & Laurence, 2015; Thébaud & Sharkey, 2016), austerity (Allen, 2016), precarity (Horton et al., 2021), experiences of criminality, gang culture (Foote-Whyte, 1981), and various types of emotional crises, mistrust and traumas spawning from parental neglect, physical and sexual abuse (Tsui et al., 2010). The complexity of young people’s everyday experiences in difficult social conditions pertaining to housing, migration and economic marginalisation are well highlighted in recent biographical research (Farrugia, 2021; Mayock & Parker, 2021; McGarry, 2021). Internationally, this field yields rich insights into the complexity of young people’s experiences in late modernity, showing the multidimensionality of the concept of youth (Cuervo et al., 2023; Pabian & Vandebosch, 2021; Renzaho et al., 2017). Social change processes and transitions are also key to understanding young people and how they go through difficult moments in their lives (Furlong & Cartmel, 2007; Irwin & Nilsen, 2018; Woodman & Wyn, 2015). The scale and depth of political and societal crises facing contemporary youth cannot be disconnected from the fact that it is more “networked” than ever before through globalisation and continuous technological innovations. As the world struggles with the armed conflict in Ukraine, whilst adjusting to post-COVID-19 social conditions, climate change and post-Brexit economic circumstances, it is pertinent and timely to “go deep” into young people’s biographies in hard times in different social and cultural contexts. While their stories as represented here illuminate the structural constraints and multifarious challenges of experiencing difficult moments through forced migration and displacement (Thompson et al., 2023), sexual cultures (Thomson et al., 2023), transitions to adulthood of care leavers (Østergaard, 2023), COVID-19 (Nico et al., 2023), homelessness and resultant personal crises (Mayock, 2023), they are also punctuated by coping strategies and agency. The rigidity of what seems inevitable and unsurpassable coexists with complex processes of assigning meaning, and with the ability of finding their own paths within or outside of their social destinies.

Biographical approaches play a central role in unveiling these dynamics. They are oriented towards eliciting personal stories to illuminate the intricacies of everyday interactions and micro-communicative encounters (Plummer, 2001; Winter et al., 2017), but they are also concerned with the dense interconnections between various global crises (e.g. armed conflicts, deepening inequalities in neo-liberal times, COVID-19), and people’s everyday personal stories (Moran et al., 2023), which are both contextually and temporally bound (O’Neill & Roberts, 2019; Wengraf, 2001). Internationally, narrative, biographical researchers illustrate the ubiquity of storytelling in our everyday lives and the complex process of young people telling stories on their own terms, including how they tell others about immense personal traumas like incidents of abuse (Mooney, 2021). The concept of “small stories” (Bamberg, 2004), which emphasises the intricacies and contexts of young people’s “everyday” storytelling and interpretations of narratives as “portals” through which we as researchers enter into the nuances of young people’s lived realities (Clandinan & Connelly, 2000), have especial resonance for this volume. Furthermore, papers highlight the flexibility and scope of a variety of biographical methods including face-to-face and online interviews, life charts, and visual methods to illuminate complex aspects of young people’s everyday lived experiences.

The practical and ethical aspects of doing biographical interviews about and during hard times are also well documented in relation to lack of co-presence in online interviewing, confidentiality and fears of triggering negative emotions (Howlett, 2022; Lupton, 2020; Moran & Caetano, 2022). Significantly, biographical researchers have been developing creative and innovative ways of accessing, observing and analysing difficult moments, especially in understanding social change (Esin & Lounasmaa, 2020; Nurse & O’Neill, 2020; O’Neill & Roberts, 2019) and specifically in relation to young people’s lives (Hesketh, 2014; Tomanovic, 2019). The biographical research field is particularly dynamic in this regard, with methods and approaches following the multiple challenges of making sense of multifaceted lives and selves (Caetano & Nico, 2019). The articles of this volume are clear examples of that.

In the following sections, we further contextualise this special issue, by exploring the processes of unveiling emotions in research with young people as “filigree work” (1.2) and reflections on relationships, emotional and identity work (1.3). The final section (1.4) summarises the principal messages for biographical research on young people’s lives, yielding fruitful avenues for further conceptual and methodological innovation and research development.

Filigree work: unveiling emotions in research

Filigree is a type of delicate ornamental work, particularly popular in Portugal, made from twisted gold or silver wires, which form intricate patterns. Metaphorically, the word filigree is frequently used to refer to an activity with a very detail-oriented focus that requires time, close attention and care. We find this a good expression to characterise the methodological work undertaken in the first two articles of this special issue. They have in common the revival of previous collected data, which were first analysed in a distinct context, or with a different privileged focus. By directing now a new, innovative and creative look at the empirical material, the authors are doing precisely a filigree work. They put into practice methodological and analytical tools capable of providing different angles of observation that bring to the forestage unnamed and less visible elements that enrich the understanding of hard times in young people’s lives. We argue that their main contribution lies in three interconnected dimensions: method, interpretation and interaction.

Beyond words

Youth can be thought of as a privileged observatory of biographical crises (Caetano, 2021), as it represents a period in life with a high density of events, transitions, identity building processes and interactions potentially at the origin of difficult or even disruptive occurrences, while also being at the intersection of life contexts that were not of their choosing (social origins) and choices they begin to make in the definition of their own life trajectories. In this sense, when doing research with young people, even when the focus is not the experience of hard times, the harshness of life may emerge quite spontaneously as part of the lived life. More traditionally, it assumes a narrative form, with the explanation of what happened and the feelings involved. Hard times are indeed strongly emotionally charged periods (Becker, 1997). But emotional expression is not circumscribed to narratives, to what is said and heard in inquiry settings. Non-verbal communication, silences, gaps, omissions, discomfort and hesitations are the veiled parts of narratives, and together with what is said, provide valuable information to understand young people’s difficult experiences (Kawabata & Gastaldo, 2015; Poland & Pederson, 1998).

Both the papers by Magda Nico, Maria Silva and Diana Carvalho, and by Rachel Thomson, Rachael Owens, Peter Redman and Rebecca Webb look for the richness of young people’s experiences beyond their own words. They use fieldnotes taken after interviews as a privileged methodological-analytical tool that render the unnamed visible (at least parts of it), and present a meta-exercise of reflecting on the researchers’ impressions after the inquiry moment. More than providing early cues and context to the interview, these immediate records give shape and texture to the emotional dimension of the research interaction and its contents, which becomes inevitably obscured in a plain transcribed text (Reed & Towers, 2023; Rubin, 2021; Sanjek, 1990; Tessier, 2012). Besides having information on the participants’ emotions, they also represent the emotional response of the researcher, who chose to highlight aspects of the interaction that can be useful to make sense of the data in the analytical process, but moreover resonate over time and have an interpretative value at a temporal distance, as Thomson, Owens, Redman and Webb’s paper clearly illustrates. Nico, Silva and Carvalho also show the relevance of creating emotional stories from numbers, by exploring the possibilities of bridging longitudinal qualitative and quantitative approaches. The stance of not opposing numbers and words opens new possibilities involving not the simple act of putting together different sets of data, but rather the exercise of combining distinctive ways of making sense of that data (Elliott, 2007; Hammersley, 1992). These methodological juxtapositions exemplify, in an extraordinary manner, its reach and the creative ways in which methods can be used to materialise what seems to have no shape.

Biographical layering

The difficult moments experienced by young people are complex at their core. The potentially sensitive nature of these experiences, the negative burden implied and their many constitutive layers make the task of observing them not impossible or ethically questionable, but particularly challenging (Lee, 1993). Their intricacy cannot be fully captured, regardless of the chosen method to produce data. We can only have glimpses or snapshots at a time, which requires a difficult balance between procedural and relational ethics, between meeting general formal guidelines on the one hand, and responding to ethically important moments emerging in the interaction with the participants on the other (Ellis, 2007; Guillemin & Gillam, 2004; Heggen & Guillemin, 2012). But despite being glances, it does not mean that they cannot return a multifaceted image of hard times in youth, especially when combining more traditional gazes (content analysis of interviews, for example) with approaches that unveil hidden angles. The two first papers of this special issue clearly show how narratives produced in interviews (in the scope of research on different topics) can be articulated with and complemented by alternative ways of approaching young people’s experiences of difficult moments. The multiple biographical layers are rendered visible by the numerous interpretative levels provided by observing the data differently: regarding other aspects, in another light and at a temporal distance.

What these articles show us is that looking at the interaction context of interviews is more than acknowledging the coproduction of data in research by both participants and researchers. It is also recognising its intrinsic analytical value, in terms of what it can add to our knowledge of the studied topic. In the case of hard times in youth, it particularly brings into the analysis the emotional dimension of young people’s experiences that could not be fully captured in their narratives. The fieldnotes used in both projects reflecting on the interactional element are illustrative of the multiple layering involved at both interpretative and biographical levels. We can identify a triple interpretative layer at play: (i) the notes are being analysed as a specific type of data (ii) that consists of the interviewer’s first impressions (iii) on young people’s own interpretation of their lives. The biographical layering refers to the juxtaposition of events, subjectivity connected to those occurrences, and emotional responses to what happened and to the very narrative produced about it. The paper by Nico, Silva and Carvalho also looks at what is many times understood in mere technical terms or as a negative feature of research: the missing data in longitudinal surveys. A non-response, the unsaid, the unseen as a way of young people interacting with the research in a longitudinal study can also be valid information about their emotional reaction to turbulent times and its evolution over time (see also Green et al., 2021).

In both papers narratives are still at the centre stage of the analytical process, but they are observed from different, atypical angles. They are not only read and understood in close connection to the fieldnotes (not being, in this sense, the single data product), as they are the subject of re-visitation. This implies returning to the narratives, either to read between the lines with the support of the fieldnotes, or to triangulate perspectives on the same set of data. The article by Thomson, Owens, Redman and Webb illustrates quite clearly how the re-enactment of a single interview, through reading out loud fieldnotes and transcripts, and performing group interpretation among researchers, can add contextual and emotional layers to the knowledge production process on biographies and difficult moments in youth.

Time also plays a key role in this process, as both papers eloquently show. Conducting interviews is not an easy task to perform. Researchers have to balance a number of concerns, specifically related to the content of the conversation, to make sure they have the information they need to understand what they are studying, while also engaging in a human interaction and building an empathetic relationship of trust, especially when talking about difficult events. All of this is done in the urgency of the moment. It is only after the interview that researchers can take a step back and look at the inquiry context at a distance, reflecting on it. It takes time for some relevant elements of research to emerge, to see what appeared imperceptible or less visible at the time, to acknowledge the presence of specific interactional dynamics. In the research by Nico, Silva and Carvalho, the time frame is of a four-year longitudinal approach that is fed by multiple inquiry moments in different formats. In the case of Thomson, Owens, Redman and Webb’s reflection, the temporal interval is of 30 years. The temporal distance plays, in this regard, a key role in connecting more explicitly biography and society, by rendering the processes in which the harshness of young people’s experiences is produced contextually and how they emotionally respond more visible.

The people within research

Both papers are articles permeated with life, with real people inside. One of the consequences of bringing the research interaction to the forestage of the methodological procedures and the interpretative process is that the focus is directed not only to the research participants (with all the concerns regarding their protection), but also to the researchers themselves. Especially in interviews, which were used by both projects, the narratives are not something standing there waiting to be collected. They are co-produced with the intervention of both interviewees and interviewers. The interview is always an interaction between active subjects, a collaborative effort that produces a contextually framed narrative, a context for the production of meaning (Fontana & Frey, 1994; Gubrium et al., 2012). It is an encounter usually between two people, each one bearing their own dispositions and frames of interpretation of themselves and of what surrounds them.

The two papers show us how the researchers were a dynamic part of the data production process, asking questions, engaging with the told stories, finding ways to overcome or minimise obstacles, and adapting their methodological strategies. But they also illustrate the human connection of the interaction process and the emotional dimension that comes with it (Plummer, 2001). During the interview, listening to the description of difficult experiences can be emotionally challenging to researchers, who have to deal with emotional displays of the participants and also with their own responses to what they are hearing. In both articles the fieldnotes are well illustrative of the importance of the interaction and of the role of the interviewers in this process, not only in their researchers’ role, but also as human beings and social actors, whose emotions, modes of relating, social positionings, and ways of understanding the world impact the sense they make of the data.

In Nico, Silva and Carvalho’s paper we find a rich reflection on how the interviewees’ difficulties in approaching specific topics were indicative of their tough nature, and on what relational practices were developed to respect the participants’ boundaries, silences and emotions, while also being empathic. The paper by Thomson, Owens, Redman and Webb is particularly interesting in what it reveals about the dynamics of proximity and distance between interviewer and interviewee and how it impacts the interpretation of the data. It also shows very clearly how transformation in social contexts and values, as well as changes in the researcher’s life over the course of many decades can provide valuable insights in regards to the interpretation of biographical cases, adding yet more layers of meaning to the research.

What we want to strongly emphasise with this brief reflection is that multi-layered research that goes beyond the immediacy of narratives and has people in it has a huge potential in unveiling emotions in research. The emotional dimension is always present when studying the experience of young people’s hard times, but the visibility this component assumes is dependent on how we look at it. Research is always a game of light and shadow. The experimentation and innovation, and also the depth and time-consuming work of both papers illuminate what often remains in the dark, producing intricate pieces of filigree research jewellery.

Moving on thin ice: young people’s emotional and identity work

The next three papers in this special issue are empirical at their core and yield deep insights into identity, relationships and emotion work, in different national contexts, among Danish care leavers (Østergaard, 2023), homeless youth in Ireland (Mayock, 2023) and displaced young people from Ukraine (Thompson et al., 2023). Drawing on findings from biographical interviews, all three articles conceptualise identity and emotions as processual and contextual, whilst showing the complexity of “feeling rules” in everyday life; unsaid conventions that regulate emotional expression/suppression in different social contexts (Hochschild, 2003). In this section, we underline four key concepts that are elucidated in these papers, identity, belonging, emotion work and relationships, illuminating labyrinthine interconnections between them. Overall, these articles further contextualise the highly emotional, relational dimensions of young people living in hard times.

Identity journeys and belonging

All three papers reveal the complexity of young people’s identity journeys during times of emotional, physical and economic hardships, thereby reinforcing the layeredness and multidimensionality of youth identity (Roseboro, 2018). Based on the results of a six-year, longitudinal biographical study of young people aged 14–22 years in Dublin, Ireland, Paula Mayock’s paper underlines the importance of home and belonging to processes of “reassembling the self”, illuminating how ontological security (Giddens, 1990) and feelings of belonging are severely undermined through experiencing different types of homelessness (e.g. transitioning from rough sleeping to temporary homeless accommodation and back again). As per Mayock, the process of “reassembling the self” upon becoming homeless is deeply emotive, with young people frequently relaying difficult emotions like fear, uncertainty and insecurity about their own futures. Moreover, the paper reveals rich narratives from young people about their own experiences of homelessness, in relation to trust in adults, complex stories of past traumas relating to relationships with family members and troubles at home. Importantly, Mayock’s work further underlines the importance of time and previous life experiences which are imbued in young people’s homelessness journeys, thus showing how early experiences of socio-economic deprivation from childhood also shaped how interviewees constructed their sense of self, across the life course. This further corroborates how disruption experienced early in life such as family bereavement, exposure to substance abuse, neglect and sexual, physical and emotional abuse significantly affects young people’s identity work in and across the life course (Green & Moran, 2022). Mayock also argues that despite social structural and personal challenges that homeless youth regularly encounter, which destabilise their trust in others and the formation of positive self-concepts, they continuously re-construct complex narratives about themselves and the person they want to become in the future.

While a growing corpus of research focuses on identity of homeless youth (Karabanow, 2006; Toolis & Hammack, 2015), and the strategies they use every day to cope with homelessness (see Farrugia, 2016), the connections between identity and ontological security of homeless young people have hitherto been largely overlooked in much extant work. Significantly, Mayock’s paper addresses this, illuminating the complex links that exist between ontological security, a person’s own sense of being in the world (Giddens, 1990), and the identities of homeless youth using biographical interviews. The process of becoming homeless significantly alters their beliefs about themselves, precipitating new uncertainties about what “might happen next” on being exposed to new risks. Narratives as revealed in Mayock’s paper regularly convey the sense of impending fear from young people who reflect on their first night staying in homeless shelters. The accounts of interviewees as discussed in papers by Østergaard and by Thompson, Nurse and Fazel also lay bare the realities of being in care and the multiple educational challenges experienced by young Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) coping with life in a new country.

Significantly, all three papers disrupt stigmatising labels that are often socially ascribed to young people who experience hard times—homeless, IDPs and care leavers –, revealing instead the complex, multi-layered effects of labelling processes on youths’ emotions and relationships. As shown in extant research, society and policy regularly enact totalising labels (Horsell, 2006; Youdell & McGimpsey, 2015) in relation to homeless young people, youth in state care and migrant youth which ignore, erase and deflect from the true complexity of their everyday experiences. In turn, the enactment of stereotypes in society and narratives of marginalisation and stigmatisation perpetuate inadequate policy solutions and negative societal understandings, therefore disregarding the many, varied challenges that young people negotiate every day.

Jeanette Østergaard’s work underlines the significance of “misfitting feelings” in understanding Danish care leavers’ relationships with biological parents, and pre-care memories that regularly affect young people’s relationships with intimate partners subsequently in the lifecourse, thus corroborating the importance of early life experiences to identity formation. Importantly, Østergaard’s paper illuminates that belonging and emotional displays/emotional suppression are intrinsically linked in care leavers’ narratives, corroborating international research on the complex emotions that frequently characterise young people’s identities in care/aftercare like fear, guilt, feeling “torn” and uncertainty (Adley & Jupp Kina, 2017). Comparable to Mayock, Østergaard shows that emotion work and identity journeys of care leavers are deeply complex and negotiated both in and across time. Indeed, all three papers elucidate that the effects of family disruption are long-lasting, affecting relationships and sense of self in a multiplicity of ways across the life course.

Ian Thompson, Lyudmila Nurse and Mina Fazel also generate rich narratives from young Internally Displaced Persons of what it means to be Ukrainian during the present armed conflict. Insights on belonging and identity from young Ukrainian people are extremely timely given the scale of the current conflict and the increased movement of refugees across Europe. Conducting research with young people aged 10–11 and 15–17 years, Thompson, Nurse and Fazel highlight the significance of educational contexts for building belonging and shared identity amongst young forced migrants, whilst showing the everyday barriers that young people face including language, knowledge of local cultures, moving to larger, urban spaces and what it means to be an IDP. While Thompson, Nurse and Fazel underline the negative impacts of forced displacement on young people, significantly, their interviews reveal the centrality of young people’s agency, planning for new and unanticipated futures and negotiating cultural and historical legacies and ideas that help them to make sense of their experiences.

As shown in these three papers, young people’s identity journeys are neither linear nor straightforward. Instead, their narratives reveal that their identities as homeless persons, care leavers and as IDPs are multidimensional and deeply connected to understandings of past lives, and narratives of future selves. At a glance, all contain stories of young people with scant social support networks who are moving on thin ice in various life domains (e.g. wellbeing, employment, housing and education). However, young people’s agency as a continual and active process and the power of hearing young people’s voices about their relationships and experiences are also significant themes that underpin these papers. These identity building processes are deeply anchored in a fragile ontological security, nonetheless, in close articulation with a permanent effort to build a stable sense of self.

Emotion work and relationships

All three papers also highlight the complexity of young people’s relationships and the importance of emotion work in everyday life. Utilising Hochschild’s (1979) work on emotions and emotion work, where emotions are “plastic and susceptible” (Hochschild, 2003, p. 42), Østergaard’s paper illuminates the complex range of emotions that characterise care leavers’ experiences and relationships, including guilt, anxiety, anger, love, admiration, and disgust. In doing so, the author highlights the intrinsically complex character of everyday “emotion work” that is performed by care leavers, revealing the centrality of emotions, “deep acting” and “surface acting” (Hochschild, 1979) in young people’s narratives. Comparable to papers by Mayock and by Thompson, Nurse and Fazel, Østergaard illuminates the significance of memories and past relationships to everyday identity building and processes of forging relationships in and across time. Interestingly, in this work, participants created new narratives about parents and past events (e.g. incidents of domestic abuse that they witnessed at home) which are central to how they make sense of their own relationships with biological families long after they exited care settings. These new narratives also served to solidify care leavers’ relationships with their fathers even when they committed acts of violence against their spouses and children. Interestingly, some interviewees wanted to uphold visions of their fathers as loving and caring and created new narratives about their mothers’ past behaviours to justify their fathers’ past violence. Importantly, in some instances, emotional narratives about their fathers also reinforced interviewees’ reasons not to perpetrate violent behaviours towards their own partners. How young people make sense of past events and processes of “doing family” (Hertz, 2006) are framed within a broader discussion of strategies operationalised to make sense of what they think they should feel about their biological parents and what they actually feel in relation to processes of evocation and suppression.

Comparable to extant research with children in care and care leavers, Østergaard’s work shows that young people’s narratives of pre-care and in-care experiences substantially affect relationships with foster carers, peers, biological families and romantic relationships subsequently in the life course (Brady & Gilligan, 2020). The paper also highlights that the dual processes of “narrative distancing” from previous life events and “bodily distancing” shape and reflect youths’ relationships with biological families, further stressing the importance of memories in their narrations of self and the complexity of their relationships. Furthermore, the importance of staying “in control” and managing distance with extended family members constitutes further noteworthy dimensions of this paper.

Mayock’s article is also imbued with young people’s accounts of relationships with family members, peers and support workers before, during and after becoming homeless. The sense of disconnectedness, risk and abandonment from family, friends and place on becoming homeless is clearly palpable throughout Mayock’s interviews. Comparably, research by Thompson, Nurse and Fazel further underlines the disconnectedness from places experienced by IDPs and separation from nature when relocating to large, industrial hubs in East Ukraine. The process of developing identities in new places given the scale of trauma experienced through forced displacement is clear in this paper. Coupled with fears about the impacts of COVID-19 on families and care givers, the multiple oppressions and inequalities that these young people negotiate in everyday life are clearly visible. Despite this, their stories also resonate with agency and resilience and are strongly future oriented.

What becomes clear when we look at these three papers together is, above all, the contextual nature of identity and emotional suppression/expression of young people going through hard times. The many difficulties they experience configure the thin ice in which they move, which implies many obstacles, risk and periods of emotional turbulence. But while being a hazard, the thin ice is also the platform over which they build their paths. These trajectories are permeated with stops, interruptions and setbacks that they cannot control, but are fuelled as well by their ways of understanding options and of making choices, considering what they foresee as possible. The three articles are exemplary in showing how the risk of falling for these young people goes hand in hand with their ability to stand up.

Making lives visible

Suffering is an integral part of life. Regardless of what causes it and at which time, everyone experiences periods of emotional and/or physical pain (Wilkinson, 2005). In youth, however, suffering takes on different contours and must be understood according to its specificities. Young people, especially minors, are dependent on the resources, contexts and options of the adults and institutions around them, being at the intersection of multiple influences of different circumstances and relationships, while also beginning the processes of autonomising in different ways. The five papers in this special issue illustrate in a clear manner the tensions arising from this juxtaposition of effects. The suffering experienced by the young people whose stories we find in this volume arise particularly from the realities in which they were born and live at the present, and that are beyond their control, be it contexts marked by profound social inequalities, or macro global events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or the Russian-Ukrainian war. All articles share the concern to capture, in the closest and most responsible way possible not only the negative consequences of what happens to them, but also what they make of it, i.e., how they cope, with what resources, assigning which meanings, with whom.

The stories of young people’s hard times presented in this special issue are marked by vulnerability and distress, even if some more than others and in different manners. These are, however, concepts that must be used carefully. They characterise phases, contexts and lived experiences, not the people themselves, nor specific pre-defined groups of people based on specific socio-demographic features or characteristics of their trajectories (Virokannas et al., 2020). These young people are more than their suffering stories, as the five articles clearly testify to. They do not perceive themselves as such when building comprehensive narratives of self-presentation, nor do the researchers interacting with them. That is, in fact, a researcher’s ethical responsibility, to not reduce individuals to their traumas, crises and negative events, even if that is the focus of the study. We find in this volume a great concern with people’s subjectivity and their identity building processes. These, despite incorporating those occurrences and emotional distress, are, however, far more complex and multidimensional than the bad things they were subjected to. Hard times are integrated in the whole of a biography that is composed by a diverse range of moments and realities.

The respect for young people’s multiplicity of experiences is shown in the relational processes of research, but also by the creative ways in which they are approached. These five papers are powerful exercises of observation of potentially sensitive topics. This is either because of the risks involved in collecting data, because of the emotional challenges involved, or because they find alternative, not so typical, creative strategies of looking at hard times and analysing them. They show us exceptionally well how the harshness of a topic should not discourage researchers from studying them. Quite the contrary; due to the many challenges involved, it can stimulate innovative ways of thinking and of looking at them without compromising procedural and relational ethics, the feasibility of the presentation of results and the integrity of the study as a whole.

The five papers in this volume transformed young people’s lived lives into visible lives. They do not give them the voice they already have; they show us how that voice can be captured and what it reveals about themselves and their experiences of being young and going through hard times. They do not externally label them and their pathways stereotypically, as being part of a vulnerable group; they reveal what contexts and moments of vulnerability can look like and are produced. They do not stigmatise them as weak; they illustrate their agency and ability to navigate through difficult periods. This special issue is, for these reasons, an immersive journey into multiple ways of being young and, simultaneously, into the dynamism of what challenging moments are and mean, according to individuals’ subjectivity and social circumstances. In a nutshell, it shows us the many youths of hard times.