Risk through the years – a statistical portrait of young people's risk perceptions and experiences relative to those of older generations

Abstract

Youth and adolescence are associated with significant changes in a person's life. According to risk theory, the changes experienced by young people today are fundamentally different from those experienced by previous generations and entail a greater degree of uncertainty. In this paper, survey and interview data are used to describe how contemporary risk experiences of young people in Britain differ from those of older generations, highlighting, in particular, their greater frequency and difference in type. Young people are also more likely to be worried about risk, and this remains the case well beyond the years of adolescence. In dealing with these real or anticipated risks, young and adolescent people turn to the traditional sources of family and friends to obtain advice. Using career decisions as a case study, we show that, whereas young people and their parents often share their risk assessments as they take into account each other's decision-making context, understanding is reduced if career paths diverge.

Keywords:

• generation
• risk
• transition
• young adulthood
• career

Acknowledgements

The research for this paper was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council under the Social Contexts and Responses to Risk Programme. Collaborators during the latter stages of this project were Noel Smith and Line Nyhagen (Centre for Research in Social Policy, Loughborough University). The author would like to thank his colleagues, Professor Taylor-Gooby (University of Kent), and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments. The researchers would like to thank the participants in the risk survey and the qualitative interviews.

Notes

1. In logistic regression, the odds of someone sharing an attitude or experience are estimated relative to a comparison group. In our analyses, we had chosen a group whose perceptions of risk most closely resembled the overall average. In the logistic regression, we also used a more detailed age breakdown than we present here.

2. The ‘do nothing’ option is distinct from relying on one's own resources. The qualitative interviews exploring career decisions and career planning highlighted a group of typically young people who described their behaviours as ‘going with the flow’ or ‘drifting along’ as they jumped from opportunity to opportunity without taking initiative. Although this behaviour also inevitably requires personal resources to manage change, it is not the type of purposive action that the risk society notion of the ‘constructed’ biography stipulates.

3. Analysing the 1994 Young People's Social Attitudes Survey, Tony Newman (1999), p. 17) found that ‘Children and young people are not yet storming the bastions of adult power.’ Adding that, among others, they want ‘parents to have a bigger say than themselves in the educational curriculum.’ The present evidence suggests that this statement needs qualifying to account for the growing divergence in life and work experiences of parents and their children. This reduces shared experiences, which are often seen as the foundation for mutual consultation.