Realities Of Young People Research Articles

Young people's mental health: facing revolution aggravated by new technologies

Young people are suffering from depression, anxiety, fatalism and may develop suicidal tendencies. The objective is to follow the paths defined by Dairymple, Lukianoff and Haidt regarding the reality of young people. The causes are not fully understood, however, the solution is to help children develop healthy trajectories to minimize mental disorders or suicidal thoughts and behaviors. We also know that schools are a source of tension and that they need to become healthier environments. We know that we are in the middle of a technological revolution, which, through Automation, affects employment and family income. And finally, the most important thing is the interest and commitment to improving communication and family support, family and community ties, as well as children's ties to school, so that they feel safe and connected.

Brazil's Bolsa Família Programme: Aspirations and Realities of Poverty Reduction and Intergenerational Change

ABSTRACTThis article considers the transformative potential of conditional cash transfers to address intergenerational poverty. Drawing on empirical evidence collected through qualitative research in the northeast of Brazil, it traces notions of intergenerational change and continuity amongst young recipients of the Bolsa Família programme (BFP) and their families. It argues that the BFP has contributed to raising expectations and aspirations of social mobility, through a policy narrative that explicitly links education to poverty reduction alongside some relatively limited but nonetheless significant intergenerational changes in material conditions and access to education. However, rising aspirations have not been matched by a concomitant expansion of opportunities available to poor young people in education and the labour market. The article thus highlights the contradictions that arise between policy narratives, the aspirations these narratives engender, and the realities of young people's everyday lives.

Смысложизненные ценности в социокультурной регуляции девиантного поведения молодежи в сфере образования

Researched is the role of traditional educational institutions in regulation of deviant behavior of young people. In social reality of young people, acts of deviant behavior are endowed with new semantic content. Previously unambiguously condemned behavioral acts associated with attitude towards the teacher, the relationship in the school team and the education system as a whole in modernconditions are interpreted ambiguously in youth environment. Meanwhile, basic foundations of universally significant norms, based on life-meaning values of the core of Russian culture, continue to be reproduced in social practices of Russian youth, thanks to mechanisms of self-regulation, that are based on mentality, archetypes, and habitus. The theme itself, the attitude to objects of education, understanding the meaning of their purpose, functions that they perform in society, are closely related to those key needs, that carriers of the cultural code have long invested in these objects. That is why in the social reality of young people hybrid forms of semantic relationship to universally significant norms begin to coexist. Young people more and more often determine for themselves, that behavioral acts should be considered appropriate for themselves, and which are deviating in the field of education.

Young people at the margins in Pretoria Central: Are the faith-based organisations making a difference?

The authors’ recent case study work in Pretoria Central as part of the international research project ‘Youth at the margins’ (YOMA) constitutes the focus of this article. From this vantage point, the authors offer a presentation of their research findings in order to ultimately answer the question ‘to what extent the faith-based organisations (FBOs) are making a difference in the lives of young people at the margins in this particular case study locality (Pretoria Central)’. The article begins by contextualising the lives of young people in Pretoria Central against the backdrop of far-reaching socio-economic, demographic and religious change in the area since the end of the apartheid era. After explaining the case study methodology and offering a brief profile of the research participants, the discussion then proceeds with a more detailed discussion of distinctive aspects of the case study findings. In the conclusion, the authors argue that the answer to the article’s guiding question seems to be a negative one when the reality of young people’s seemingly permanent structural exclusion is considered. At the same time, this verdict does not withhold them to also conclude with appreciative remarks about the role that churches and FBOs of the non-governmental organisation (NGO) type are playing with respect to marginalised young people in Pretoria Central.

Regulating Youth Sexuality, Agency and Citizenship: Developing a Coherent Criminal Justice Response to Youth Sexting

Currently the law in England and Wales means that young people who engage in mutually consensual teenage sexting may find that this activity has been recorded on their criminal record and may be disclosed in a way which impacts negatively upon the young person’s future opportunities even where no charges have been brought. This information can usually only be removed from the records in exceptional and rare cases. This article will argue that this paternalistic and moralistic approach towards mutually consensual teenage sexting overrides consideration of children’s rights to explore their sexuality by defining youth sexuality as inherently illegitimate and illegal. The strong preference for safeguarding the future adult the child will become undermines the recognition of children as rights holders right now, depriving the child of agency and voice. The legal response to sexting, and child exploitation more generally, needs to be informed by an understanding of youth sexualities that are more fully based in, and driven by, the realities of young people’s sexual lives. By recognising young people as holders of sexual rights and sexual citizenship, this would allow children’s voices to be heard in developing responses to expressions of their sexuality.

Rethinking the meaning of “family” for war-affected young people: implications for social work education

ABSTRACTThis article examines how the experiences and realities of young people affected by war challenge the “typical” portrayal of family in social work education. Using aspects of duoethnography as a method of inquiry, the authors discuss war-affected social work students’ experience of elements of their curriculum and training. The discomforts shared point to important tensions and discords with prevailing traditional social work teaching concepts and approaches. War-affected young people feel that their realities often do not correspond to Western theories of human and child development and resettlement expectations. In making social work education more relevant and useful, there is a need to rethink the portrayal of family as well as teaching strategies. As part of this process, an increased sensitivity among social work educators is paramount, not only to the cultural, religious, geopolitically and ethnically diverse realities of children and families, but also to engaging young people directly in the learning process.

Doing data differently? Developing personal data tactics and strategies amongst young mobile media users

Large amounts of personal data are generated through young people’s engagements with mobile media, with these data increasingly (re)used by advertisers, content developers and other third parties to profile, predict and position individuals. This has prompted growing concerns over the ability of mobile media users to develop informed stances towards how and why their data is being used, i.e. to build ‘conscious’ and/or ‘resistant’ forms of ‘data agency’. This paper explores ways of developing the critical consciousness and resistant practices of young mobile media users towards personal data. Drawing on research with 27 young people (aged 13–17 years), the paper describes efforts to make representations of third party use of personal data openly available as a basis from which to develop data-savvy tactics and strategies. The results of these interventions – while only partially successful – offer valuable insights into the technical, social and cultural issues that shape young people’s engagement with personal data. The paper concludes by considering how concerns over data agency might be better aligned with the realities of young people’s mobile media use.

LA VIOLENCIA DE GÉNERO EN JÓVENES ADOLESCENTES DESDE LOS ESTEREOTIPOS DE LAS RELACIONES DE PAREJA. ESTUDIO DE CASO EN COLOMBIA Y EN ESPAÑA

Abstract.GENDER VIOLENCE IN YOUNG ADOLESCENTS FROM THE STEREOTYPES OF RELATIONSHIPS. CASE STUDY IN COLOMBIA AND SPAIN.Based on knowledge gatherings from a participatory research, different scenarios of adolescents are explored in two regions, Colombia and Spain, in order to analyze many of the attitudes, prejudices and stereotypes that are immersed in the realities of young people in both countries. To this end, the present work presents the different social and cultural scenarios, and after the ethnographic field work, from in-depth interviews, semi-structured interviews and discussion groups, the aim is to recognize a dialogue of knowledge that goes beyond reality, A space for reflection and change in the scenarios where research has been carried out, with the aim of engaging in both realities similarities of opinions, symbols and attitudes in gender relations, as well as the strategies that young people contribute to improve these relationships in different socio-educational settings, the community setting and higher education.Keywords: gender violence, dialogue of knowledge, adolescents, Colombia, SpainResumen.A partir de encuentros de saberes desde una investigación participante, se recorren diversos escenarios de adolescentes en dos regiones, Colombia y España, con el fin de analizar muchas de las actitudes, prejuicios y estereotipos que están inmersos en las realidades de jóvenes en ambos países. Para ello el presente trabajo presenta los diferentes escenarios sociales y culturales, y posteriormente tras el trabajo de campo etnográfico, desde entrevistas en profundidad, entrevistas semiestructuradas y grupos de discusión, se pretende reconocer un diálogo de saberes que vaya más allá de la realidad, aportando un espacio de reflexión y cambio en los escenarios donde se han realizado las investigaciones, con el objetivo de entablar en ambas realidades, similitudes de pareceres, símbolos y actitudes en las relaciones de género, además de las estrategias que aportan los y las jóvenes para mejorar estas relaciones en diferentes ámbitos socioeducativos, el escenario comunitario y la educación superior.Palabras claves: violencia de género, diálogo de saberes, adolescentes, Colombia, España

Sex Education: Challenges and Choices

ABSTRACTNoting public concern about sexual exploitation, abuse and sexualisation, we argue that sex education in the UK needs revision. Choice is a feature of current sex education policy and, acknowledging that choice can be problematic, we defend its place in an approach to sex education premised on informed deliberation, relational autonomy, a particular view of personhood and moral literacy. We argue, however, that choice and the approach outlined must be located in the realities of young people’s lives.

The dynamic, complex and diverse living and care arrangements of young New Zealanders: implications for policy

ABSTRACTThe living arrangements of young people in New Zealand are diverse and often complex. In this article we report the range of care and living arrangements of 209 15-year-old New Zealanders, 47 of whom identified as Māori. These young people were participants in the second generation of a cohort study. Data were collected from their parents via a life history calendar and analysed for variety and consistency of care arrangements, household membership and transitions. Few participants had a consistent pattern of parental care arrangements and most had experienced multiple changes in household composition and frequent changes of address. We conclude that the whānau/family lives of many young New Zealanders are complex and dynamic. These observations contrast with the conventional notions of family life that form the basis for New Zealand’s family policies. We argue that social policies and services impacting on young people need to reflect the lived reality of young people if they are to meet young people’s needs.

La traducción al español de Entre les murs: el lenguaje coloquial, el argot y el verlan

La difficulté la plus remarquable de la traduction audiovisuelle est liée à la traduction de dialogues, qui sont censés reproduire les caractéristiques de la langue orale plus ou moins spontanée. Ce travail vise à analyser les difficultés et les stratégies pour la traduction en espagnol adoptées dans le cas du film Entre les murs (2008). Ce film, qui nous montre la vie quotidienne d’un groupe d’élèves et leurs professeurs, se caractérise par être le reflet d’une réalité sociale française, celle des jeunes des banlieues, qui constitue un univers particulier; du point de vue linguistique, elle se distingue par l’emploi d’un registre oral, d’un langage propre aux jeunes et par la présence de l’argot, notamment le verlan.

‘Women are supposed to be the leaders’: intersections of gender, race and colonisation in HIV prevention with Indigenous young people

Focusing on gender, race and colonialism, this paper foregrounds the voices of Indigenous young people, their histories of oppression, their legacies of resistance and the continuing strengths rooted in Indigenous peoples, their cultures and their communities. Exploring the relationship between gender and colonialism, the paper speaks to the lived realities of young people from Indigenous communities across Canada. Over 85 young people participated in six different Indigenous community workshops to create artistic pieces that explored the connections between HIV, individual risk and structural inequalities. In the course of the research, Indigenous young people, and young Indigenous women in particular, talked about how gender intersects with race and colonisation to create experiences that are, at times, especially difficult for them. In this paper, young people discuss the ways in which colonialism has demeaned women's roles and degraded women's sexuality, and how continuing cultural erasure and assimilationist policies impact on their lives and on their bodies.

Some Issues That Permeate Higher Education Discourse in South Africa That Require Attention by Traditional Universities and Business Schools

This paper explores an array of higher education issues that require careful consideration by traditional universities, distance education colleges and universities, academics and indeed government and its bureaucracy in terms of how higher education is approached generally in respect of the formulation of some education policy imperatives within higher education in South Africa. In reality the paper explores or takes the approach of delineating a compact of issues that will require serious understanding and discussion in respect of the issues being raised. In approaching this paper, the writer will for all intents and purposes summarize some of the articles and issues discussed in the supplement of the Mail and Guardian Getting Ahead, August 3 to 9: 2012. Where applicable other issues will be raised that go beyond the issues raised in the series of articles discussed in the supplement. In addition, the writer will also project on the issues discussed by generating some of his own opinions within the narrative. In so doing the following issues will be nuanced and discussed:  Matching policy with reality for young people in South Africa.  The free market for students.  Research at the cost of teaching.  Research is at the mercy of plutocracy.  Former Technikons have an identity crisis.  Social cohesion by promoting the teaching of African languages.  The need for multifaceted leaders to meet the challenges of globalized higher education and for purposes of development.  Postgraduates need a better deal It is hoped that the discussion of the above issues will stimulate reasoned debate and that both traditional and distance higher education institutions and South African Business Schools, and higher education policy makers will incorporate some of these issues within the ambit of their policy formulation, and the vision and mission of their institutions. Kuwait Chapter of Arabian Journal of Business and Management Review Vol. 3, No.2; Oct. 2013 113 The paper in no way pretends to capture the issues discussed, in terms of any finality, nor does it pretend to have captured or for that matter exhausted the issues to any degree of finality.

Looking Good: The Cultural Politics of the Island Dress for Young Women in Vanuatu

In this article, I explore the contingent and contested boundaries of looking good for young women in Vanuatu and the ways in which they negotiate these boundaries. I use women's dress as a lens through which to focus on the relationships among gender, modernity, race, and morality, and I show the ways in which all four are condensed and embodied in the moral and aesthetic imperative for women to look good. In particular, I focus on the island dress, a dress first introduced by missionaries but taken up after independence as an emblem of national pride and as the traditional dress for women. Although wearing the island dress is the commonsense way for women to look good, the young women with whom I conducted fieldwork in 2001-2002 and again in 2008 and 2011 experienced a great deal of ambivalence about the dress. They often preferred to wear trousers and T -shirts, which frequently won them the disapproval of their elders. By focusing on the polyvalent meanings of the island dress, the realities of young people's everyday lives in the capital, and the uneven terrain of the dress-scape of Vanuatu, I show that young women's love/hate relationship with island dress reflects their frustration with their ambiguous place in the contemporary national imaginary.

Troubling transitions? Young people's experiences of growing up in poverty in rural Andhra Pradesh, India

Global policy attention has begun to focus on young people in developing countries and much of the discourse is framed around notions of ‘transition to adulthood’ based on the idea that individuals develop in linear ways, separate from family and community. This idea has already been widely critiqued in western contexts. This article explores the lives of children growing up in rural Andhra Pradesh, India, who are no longer in formal schooling, drawing on data from Young Lives, a longitudinal study of children in four developing countries. Analysis combines descriptive statistics and qualitative longitudinal research. This article suggests that many of the assumptions underpinning the international discourse fail to match with the realities of young people's everyday lives in rural India. It suggests that young people's obligations to family, combined with a sense of destiny, constrained by gender norms, help to explain their ‘transitions’ – transitions that are interconnected and depend on each other. This article concurs that the concept of transition may be useful as a heuristic device, but that it must be used critically and not simply be imposed on contexts that are themselves in transition and in process of rapid social change.

Ambiguous agencies: coping and survival in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

Providing empirical evidence of young people's experiences of survival and coping in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), this article draws on elements of resilience theory and presents narratives offered by young people on how they survive and cope with violence and adversity. Exploring individual accounts of coping and survival, this article reveals how far removed international rights-based child protection approaches are from the actual lived realities of young people in eastern DRC. The aim of this article is to challenge child protection actors to deepen their understandings of the socio-economic adversity and structural violence in which young people live towards the development of more relevant interventions which might more effectively contribute to improved outcomes for young people living in contexts of protracted violence.

Young people and sexual agency in rural Uganda

This paper offers an analysis of young people's sexual agency in rural Uganda. Drawing on definitions of agency from within the international development literature, it focuses on: decision-making processes leading to young people's involvement in relationships; actions undertaken to maintain ‘secret’ relationships in contexts where young people's sexual agency is generally prohibited; transactional and gendered negotiations between young people involved within a relationship; and a range of outcomes arising from young people's sexual activity. An understanding of the dynamics and temporal nature of young people's sexual agency, and the consequences that follow from it, challenges the widely held view that young people do not know what they are doing in relation to their sexual health. This should enable practitioners to identify avenues for developing HIV prevention and sexual health programmes that are more fully based in, and driven by, the realities of young people's sexual lives.

‘Concrete bodies’: young Latina women transgressing the boundaries of race and class in white inner-city Stockholm

This article examines young Latina women's interactions in the urban landscape of Stockholm, with a particular focus on white, middle-class areas, and how social difference and racial positioning are produced in and through the processes of urban segregation. Although Stockholm consists of different multiethnic and middle-class white suburbs, a discourse of sharp division between ‘the suburb’ and the inner-city is prevalent in the daily press. Here ‘the suburb’ is either portrayed as dangerous or exotic. This article is based on qualitative research with 29 young Latina women living and attending schools in both the suburban and inner-city areas. This approach facilitates an understanding of how gendered, racialized and classed aspects of segregation are embodied in multiple directions and how mechanisms of spatial exclusion prevail in predominantly white areas – often seen as ‘neutral’ or non-racialized areas. In conclusion, in order to capture the realities of young people's lives within materialized discourses of race and space, I argue that it is crucial to include white settings in the analysis, and experiences of exclusion.

Silencing the everyday experiences of youth? Deconstructing issues of subjectivity and popular/corporate culture in the English classroom

This paper investigates the influence of popular/corporate culture texts and discourses on the subjectivities and everyday social experiences of young people, and the extent to which such influences are critically analysed in the English classroom. I present two levels of synthesised information using data analysis born of a mixed-methods postgraduate research project with a group of 15- and 16-year-old high school students in Perth, Australia. First, I argue that popular culture texts position young people to assume subjectivities that are heavily informed by the ideologies and discourses of popular/corporate culture. Moreover, I argue that young people's social currency is often defined by the extent to which individuals demonstrate an alliance to such ideologies and discourses, and that individuals who deviate from popular norms experience subjugation and exclusion within peer and social settings. Second, I deal pedagogically with subject English and areas of it that hold relevance in terms of the integration and analysis of ‘the popular’. I argue that many students feel their teachers are ‘out of touch’ with the everyday realities of young people and their popular culture influences, and that there is a lack of commitment by teachers to critically analyse popular culture texts in the classroom. The paper concludes by arguing that such failures risk producing students whose everyday experiences are silenced and who are denied the critical learning spaces necessary to deconstruct the ways they are positioned to adopt certain subjectivities. Moreover, critical and progressive pedagogical praxis need to be further deployed by educators in order to effectively analyse the relationship between youth subjectivities and popular/corporate culture discourses.

Loving with irony: young Bombay viewers discuss clothing, sex and their encounters with media

The media landscape in urban India has changed so rapidly in the past 10 years that it is not easy to consider the ways in which these changes interact with people's lives and beliefs. Apocalyptic pronouncements about the ways in which MTV‐style television, films and the Internet are destroying ‘genuine’ Indian culture by promoting western sexual values abound in journalistic and political circles. But what are the realities of young people's encounters with media in a thriving Indian metropolis? How do they make sense of all the vastly different images of sexuality embodied in community/religious edicts and modern media? And how are their interpretations of all these supposed ‘messages’ played out in their everyday lives? Emerging from a three‐year study of youth audiences of Hindi films in London and Bombay, this article explores the ways in which young people's sexual attitudes, values and behaviours are inflected by encounters with films, television and the Internet. By focusing on understandings of sex and love within the context of statements about community norms, sex education and personal sexual practices, this article also engages with ideas and myths about representations of women that have dominated recent debates on sex, censorship and the media in India.