In Transition – Patterns of Development and Change Among Vulnerable Young People

Abstract

This paper seeks to contribute to current debates about the nature of youth transitions. Transitions research seeks to account for more than just individual-level maturational processes, recognising that the pathway from childhood to adulthood is heterogenous and subject to the influence of macro-level factors such as political, social and economic environments. Within these larger debates this paper has a particular concern with three things. First, responding to calls for research to gather a diverse suite of indicators when examining youth transitions, it examines a range of potential indicators in terms of how they might help us understand better the transition experiences of a group of vulnerable young people. Here improvements in individual-level and neighbourhood-level indicators are observed alongside increasing educational risks and high levels of family risk that remain stable over time. Second, building on the work of others, who have argued that we need to be concerned about the experience of transition as a process as much with the various destinations at which youth may arrive, it explores the ways these indicators change over time. Third, by focusing specifically on the in-transition experiences of a group of youth who face more than the ‘normal’ range of challenges during adolescence it seeks to add to the corpus of knowledge concerning the heterogeneity of youth transitions.