The ‘healthy self’ and ‘risky’ young Other: young people's interpretations of health and health-related risks

Abstract

Concern about health-related risks dominates modern day public health discourses on young people's health. Based on ‘official’ notions of health, the public health risk-based approach not only downplays the potentially different meanings young people attach to concepts of health, but it also has a tendency to problematise and pathologise young people and their health. Drawing on findings from an ethnographic study with young people aged 15–16 years in England (n = 55); in this article, I examine young people's understandings of health and health-related risks. I used group discussions, individual interviews and observational work in a school and surrounding community settings to collect the data on which this article is based. In this article, I show the importance young people in my study attached to ‘being happy’ and ‘having fun’, but also how dominant constructions of youth as a time of risk were taken up and reproduced by young people themselves to create and sustain differences amongst young people. I examine the implications of these differences for young people's health and the possibilities for empowerment – highlighting some of the emergent contradictions between young people's constructions of the ‘healthy self’ and ‘risky’ young Other. Specifically, in this article, I highlight young people's preference for a more positive conceptualisation of their health, one which recognises the importance of their shared social positioning for the promotion of health.