Abstract
Objective: Leisure-time is an important part of young people’s lives. One way to reduce social differences in health is to improve adolescents’ living conditions, for example by enhancing the quality of after-school activities. Multicultural, socially deprived suburbs have less youth participation in organized leisure-time activities. This study explores who the participants are at two NGO-run youth-centers in multicultural, socially deprived suburbs in Sweden and whether socio-demographic, health-related, and leisure-time factors affect the targeted participation. Methods: The study can be seen as an explanatory mixed-methods study where qualitative data help explain initial quantitative results. The included data are a survey with youth (n = 207), seven individual interviews with staff, and six focus-groups interviews with young people at two youth-centers in two different cities. Results and Conclusions: The participants in the youth-centers are Swedish born youths having foreign-born parents who live with both parents, often in crowded apartments with many siblings. Moreover they feel healthy, enjoy school and have good contact with their parents. It seems that strategies for recruiting youths to youth-centers have a large impact on who participates. One way to succeed in having a more equal gender and ethnicity distribution is to offer youth activities that are a natural step forward from children’s activities. The youth-centers’ proximity is also of importance for participation, in these types of neighborhoods.
Highlights
Leisure-time is important for young people’s psychological, cognitive, and physical development [1]
This study has aimed to explore who participate in two non-governmental organizations (NGOs)-run youth-centers in multicultural, socially deprived suburbs in Sweden with special focus on socio-demographic factors, health-related factors, or leisure-time factors
It is hard to say if this is the case for these youth, but especially youth-center V has the policy always to meet with the parents of participants, unless staffs already have been in natural contact with the parents because they accompanied the participant as a young child
Summary
Leisure-time is important for young people’s psychological, cognitive, and physical development [1]. (2015) Two NGO-Run Youth-Centers in Multicultural, Socially Deprived Suburbs in Sweden—Who Are the Participants? Leisure-time comprises a large part of young people’s lives today and differs in some ways from that of earlier generations [4] [5]. Multicultural, socially deprived suburbs have less youth participation in organized leisure-time activities than other areas, due to both their higher proportion of immigrants and lower socioeconomic status (SES) [7]-[9]. One way to reduce social differences in health is to improve children’s and adolescents’ living conditions, for example by enhancing the quality of school and after-school activities [12]. Much of the variation in health among children and adolescents can be explained by social factors (cf. [13] [14])
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