Young people's perspectives on health, risks and physical activity in a Danish secondary school

Abstract

In this article, we examine how risk discourses related to health and physical activity are used and understood by the young people in a Danish school setting. We aim to give a detailed account of students’ experiences and to present their views on how they understand and comprehend matters concerning their own health. The study on which this article is based was designed to form the basis of an intervention through action research in the school setting. To undertake such an intervention, we needed to know what kind of meanings the students of upper secondary school impute to health, risk and physical activity and to understand the dominant discourses of health in this setting. The article draws on four focus group interviews with secondary school students (N = 30 students). Groupings were created with equal numbers of boys and girls between the ages of 15 and 17 years, and all of the students are from middle class families. The focus group interviews were developed as group interviews that enabled participants share their views on health, risk and physical activity. We drew on risk sociology to analyse participants’ accounts of the opportunities and challenges provided by sports and physical activity in the upper secondary school setting. For the young people in our study, risk could be both enabling and constraining aspects of risk. Their everyday life was not marked by avoidance of risk and health issues. They pictured an ‘ideal of the civilised body’ – one that was not being fat – and they disciplined their action by doing fitness activities regardless of whether they liked them or not. For these young people, the sports and partying (including alcohol consumption) cultures were not in conflict but were part of the same culture of optimism and components of their prefered lifestyle. Such findings indicate that future health messages about sports/physical activity for young people should focus on positive contributions to life rather than judgement, deprivation and asceticism and that health promotion should be considered in terms of an aesthetic interest in life.