Rachel Thomson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3604126 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rachel Thomson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rachel |
| FAMILY NAME | Thomson |
| SIGNATURE | THOMSON R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sussex |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3955-5818 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 65 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 928 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 65 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Reanimating data: Working with archives to revitalise young sexualities, past and present
Purpose: In this paper, we outline a method for working with the long past materials of social research to forge a method for engaging and co-producing knowledge with new audiences in the present. Findings: Situated in a conceptual landscape of queer theory and feminist archive activism, through this paper we share what happened when a 30-year-old landmark feminist research project (the Women, Risk & AIDS Project ) was saved, archived and shared …
The Many Minds approach to group data analysis: A Cat’s Cradle
In this editorial our intention is to describe the Many Minds approach to group data analysis and to contribute to current discussion about the affordances and pitfalls of collective research practices. We showcase work emerging from a particular research culture within the School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sussex and describe the way it has facilitated psychosocially informed qualitative data analysis. The editorial begins…
Sanctuary/ing: A Tender Knowledge Practice in Toxic Times
How do we – scholars in the academy – hold ourselves, each other and the practices of intellectual work in times of entangled multispecies, geopolitical and educational crises? This article presents and reflects on a two-year writing experiment that involved a regular, virtual, group-writing practice among four academics situated in the global North. The writing and resulting discussions evolved into a shared archive and a recursive archiving pra…
On not to jumping to conclusions: Working in a Many Minds group as part of doctoral training
This article explores the role of a Many Minds data-analysis group within the broader context of doctoral research culture, highlighting its significance as a supportive space for researchers in training. Over a six-month period, a conversation between two contributors, a PhD supervisor and the supervisee, captures the enriching impact of this collaborative dialogue on a PhD project investigating the experience of transitions of young people leav…
Working with Many Minds: An Annotated Bibliography
This annotated bibliography is aimed at those new to the Many Minds approach to collective data analysis, wishing to understand its history and influence. We present a conceptual map, distinguishing three key bodies of work/fields, including: psychoanalytically informed group seminars; narrative approaches to sharing and reusing data; and collaborative group-based data analysis associated with feminist methodologies. Starting at the centre of a V…
Association between individual level characteristics and take-up of a Minimum Income Guarantee for Pensioners: Panel Data Analysis using data from the British Household Panel survey 1999–2002
A Minimum Income Guarantee (MIG) ensures people have a minimum amount of income for essentials such as healthy food, housing, health care, social and digital networks to support health and well-being. MIGs could be a useful tool to reduce inequalities. A MIG will only be effective if those who are eligible take it up. The aim of this paper is to explore how individual characteristics were associated with take-up of a MIG for pensioners (aged 60+ …
Reanimating feminist archives: Ethics and praxis
This study explores the complexities of developing feminist archives with a particular focus on the ‘Feminist Approaches to Youth Sexuality (FAYS)’ archive, created as part of the Reanimating Data project (RAD, 2018-21). Through this case study, we explore the ethical considerations and practices involved in reanimating a landmark feminist study, the Women, Risk, and AIDS Project (WRAP), and emphasize the ethical dimensions of reanimation process…
Revisiting young masculinities through a sound art installation: What really counts
What Really Counts? was a sound art installation created in 2019 through a collaboration between a sociologist and a multidisciplinary artist, working with in-depth interviews with young men recorded as part of a British feminist social research project in 1990, exploring sexualities and the threat of HIV/AIDS. In this article, we describe the evolution and staging of the sound art installation project, situating it within interdisciplinary liter…
Starting with the archive: Principles for Prospective Collaborative Research
What are participants and researchers agreeing to when they consent to having data archived and what do they imagine the future life of their data to be? In this paper, we reflect on a project that deliberately started rather than ended with the archive. The Everyday Childhoods project invited children and their families to take part in the creation of an open access public archive documenting everyday childhoods using a range of multimedia data.…
Understanding inequalities through childhood studies
As an interdisciplinary field, childhood studies has proved to be resilient -often hosted within higher education institutions by departments of education or social work/ social policy and drawing in contributions from across university curricula.It also finds synergies with professional training programmes in teacher, early years and social work training.Childhood studies is a training as well as an education, producing practitioners, researcher…
Mental health and health behaviours before and during the initial phase of the Covid-19 lockdown: Longitudinal analyses of the UK Household Longitudinal Study
Background There are concerns that COVID-19 mitigation measures, including the ‘lockdown’, may have unintended health consequences. We examined trends in mental health and health behaviours in the UK before and during the initial phase of the COVID-19 lockdown and differences across population subgroups. Methods Repeated cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of the UK Household Longitudinal Study, including representative samples of over 27,0…
Open-ended transitions to adulthood: Metaphorical thinking for times of stasis
In this article we engage critically with how metaphors have been used in sociological youth studies, including a turn to new metaphors that capture the foreclosure of futures and experiences of waiting, delay and non-institutional temporalities. Drawing on the resources of queer theory we challenge the developmentalism that underpins youth studies, employing notions of the impasse and growing sideways to capture the open-endedness of young adult…
Too Much Too Young? Revisiting Young Motherhood
Part of a 10 year Anniversary issue this short paper reflects on a 30 year period in the UK where young motherhood moves from being a respectable working class practice into the ‘problem’ of teenage pregnancy, subsequently ‘solved’ and replaced by new categories of concern. Working with her own field notes generated as part of a sociological study of teenage sexuality carried out in Manchester in 1989, the author engages with awkwardness and resi…
Carbon-lite collaboration: A virtual visual matrix
In this article we present an example of psychosocial practice – a visual matrix – which attempted to address and embody carbon-lite research methods in the face of global heating. Combining virtual and face-to-face modes of presence and interaction generated insights as well as posing challenges. In the article we explore two ideas through a discussion of ‘interference’ and ‘inclusion/exclusion’. The article extends our understanding of the meth…
Narrative sense-making and prospective social action: Methodological challenges and new directions
The ways in which humans narratively make sense of their lives shape how they navigate the future. At least, that is what prominent philosophers like Sartre, Ricoeur and MacIntyre proposed. Philosophically this idea has roots in the long-standing thesis of mimesis; like art imitates life and life imitates art in the Aristotelian sense, so do life and stories imitate each other (Bruner, 1987). Despite the tenacity of the idea, relatively little re…
Thinking through cases: Articulating variable and narrative logics on a longitudinal analysis of drug use and school drop out
Mixed methods longitudinal studies continue to be rare, yet have potential for transcending the limits of qualitative and quantitative paradigms. This article compares the life stories of 47 young people generated from a cohort study of 6000 children born in 1995. The cases were sampled through an association between two variables – drug use and leaving school early – generating a four-field table. Comparing the cases within and across each table…
New frontiers in qualitative longitudinal research: An agenda for research
This paper outlines the state of the art in qualitative longitudinal methodology, reflecting on more than 10 years of development since a previous special issue on QLR was published by the International Journal of Social Research Methodology in 2003. The papers presented in this special issue emerge from a methodological innovation network that brought together an international community of researchers in order to map new frontiers for the method…
Spectacles of intimacy? Mapping the moral landscape of teenage social media
This paper explores young people's expressed concerns about privacy in the context of a highly mediated cultural environment, mapping social media practices against axes of visibility and participation. Drawing on interdisciplinary conceptual resources from both the humanities and social sciences, we use ‘spectacles of intimacy’ to conceptualise breaches of privacy, mapping an emergent moral landscape for young people that moves beyond concerns w…
Generational research: Between historical and sociological imaginations
This paper reflects on Julia Brannen’s contribution to the development of theory and methods for intergenerational research. The discussion is contextualised within a contemporary ‘turn to time’ within sociology, involving tensions and synergies between sociological and historical imagination. These questions are informed by a juxtaposition of Brannen’s four-generation study of family change and social historian Angela Davis’s exploration women a…
Hello from us
Storying qualitative longitudinal research: Sequence, Voice and Motif
We suggest here that the analysis, interpretation and representation of qualitative longitudinal (QL) data requires methodological innovation leading to new forms of representation that elude the usual temporality of writing research. To illustrate this argument, we outline a case history method-in-process developed to condense intensive volumes of biographical data generated over 12 years, and deal with the intersection of different timescapes t…
Acting up and acting out: Encountering Children in a Longitudinal Study of Mothering
Despite a proliferation of research exploring children's lives and relationships over the past two decades, there is a notable absence of research which explores family relationships from the perspective of very young children (age 0-3). This article reports on data emerging from a study of new mothering with a particular focus on very young children's active engagement with wider family narratives. The study employs a qualitative longitudinal de…
Situated Affect in Traveling Data: Tracing Processes of Meaning Making in Qualitative Research
This article brings psychosocial methods into conversation with methodological and ethical debates arising from the reuse of qualitative research material, and with issues of ethnographic practice. Our empirical grounding came from the psychosocial technique of reading research texts aloud in a group, listening in an affectively attuned way, and sharing our responses. The texts we revisited-infant observation notes of interactions between a young…
Making modern mothers
What does motherhood mean today? Drawing on interviews with new mothers and intergenerational chains of women in the same family, this exciting and timely book documents the transition to motherhood over generations and time. Exploring, amongst other things, the trend to later motherhood and the experience of teenage pregnancy, a compelling picture emerges. Becoming a mother is not only a profound moment of identity change but also a site of soci…
Figuring Families: Generation, Situation and Narrative in Contemporary Mothering
This paper contributes to the theme of the special issue by identifying concepts that both embody relationality and have the capacity to address and articulate temporal processes. Based on an empirical study of first time motherhood, we offer a sensitising conceptual framework which privileges the temporal, scaffolding the macro socio-historical with the micro personal and subjective. The study combines longitudinal and intergenerational approach…
Critical Moments: Choice, Chance and Opportunity in Young People's Narratives of Transition
The 'Inventing Adulthoods' study seeks to document transitions to adulthood reported by over 100 young people living in five contrasting communities in the UK over a five-year period. A principal aim of the study is to identify 'critical moments' in young people's biographies and to explore how these moments are implicated in processes of social inclusion and exclusion. This article reports on an analysis of the first of three rounds of one-to-on…
The Qualitative Longitudinal Case History: Practical, Methodological and Ethical Reflections
This paper describes the development of 'case histories' from a qualitative longitudinal data set that followed 100 young people's transitions to adulthood over a ten year period. The paper describes two stages in the analytic process: first, the forging of a case history from a longitudinal archive and second, bringing case histories into conversation with each other. The paper emphasises two aspects of a qualitative longitudinal data set: the l…
Hindsight, foresight and insight: The challenges of longitudinal qualitative research
This paper describes a UK based longitudinal qualitative study following approximately 100 young people over 9 years. It provides an overview of the research design, methods of data collection and analysis as well as reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of the strategies employed. We focus on the value of a devolved research design, complementary cross-section and temporal analytic approaches and the effects of being involved in a longitudi…
Sex, gender and power: Young women's sexuality in the shadow of Aids
While the incidence of HIV infection and AIDS amongst non drug injecting heterosexuals is currently low in the UK, epidemiological evidence suggests that this situation may be short lived. The sexual practices of young heterosexuals will then be crucial in determining the extent of the epidemic. Drawing on feminist theory, we argue that if we are to understand young people's sexual relationships we must attend to the power relations within which …
New frontiers in qualitative longitudinal research: An agenda for research
This paper outlines the state of the art in qualitative longitudinal methodology, reflecting on more than 10 years of development since a previous special issue on QLR was published by the International Journal of Social Research Methodology in 2003. The papers presented in this special issue emerge from a methodological innovation network that brought together an international community of researchers in order to map new frontiers for the method…
Between cosmopolitanism and the locals: Mobility as a resource in the transition to adulthood
How useful is the distinction between cosmopolitans and locals in understanding the place of mobility and travel within contemporary youth transition? In this article we draw on a qualitative longitudinal study of young people in the UK, suggesting that localities have their own particular economy of mobility, operating at levels of the material, cultural and fantasy. In different localities young people are tied to the immediacy of physical and …
Imagined Adulthood: Resources, plans and contradictions
In this paper we illustrate the contradictory consequences of female individualization by exploring young people’s imagined futures, drawing on an analysis of ‘lifelines’ collected as part of an ongoing longitudinal qualitative study of young people’s transitions to adulthood. We discuss the method and compare lifelines across the sample. We suggest that while there are areas of consensus (such as the hetero-normative goal of marriage and childre…
Imagining Gendered Adulthood: Anxiety, Ambivalence, Avoidance and Anticipation
In this article, the authors draw on two qualitative, longitudinal studies of young people’s transitions to adulthood and how they construct these transitions over time in social, cultural and material terms. The authors focus on the hopes, anxieties and imagined futures of young women. They discuss the individualization thesis, and the contradiction for female individualization between expectations of equality and the reality of inequality betwe…
Mental health and health behaviours before and during the initial phase of the Covid-19 lockdown: Longitudinal analyses of the UK Household Longitudinal Study
Background There are concerns that COVID-19 mitigation measures, including the ‘lockdown’, may have unintended health consequences. We examined trends in mental health and health behaviours in the UK before and during the initial phase of the COVID-19 lockdown and differences across population subgroups. Methods Repeated cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of the UK Household Longitudinal Study, including representative samples of over 27,0…
Unfolding lives: Youth, gender and change
Inventing Adulthoods: A Biographical Approach to Understanding Youth Citizenship
Traditionally adulthood and citizenship have been synonymous. Yet adulthood is changing. In this paper we explore how young people's evolving understandings of adulthood may contribute towards an understanding of citizenship within the broader context of increasingly extended and fragmented transitions. The paper draws on a unique qualitative longitudinal data set in which 100 young people, from contrasting social backgrounds in the United Kingdo…
Gaining Perspective on Choice and Fate
The idea of epiphanies, turning points and critical biographical moments is a central analytic category of life history research in general, and of youth studies in particular. In this paper we explore how we have engaged with ideas of ‘fatefulness’ (Giddens 1991) and biographical ‘choice’ in a longitudinal qualitative study of young people's transitions to adulthood, tracing the employment of theoretical and analytical devices through time to as…
Power and Desire: The Embodiment of Female Sexuality
In recent years the study of the body has blossomed from a neglected area of social science to a focus of attention from feminists and others (e.g., Turner, 1984; Featherstone etal. 1991, Sawicki, 1991; Shilling, 1991; Scott and Morgan, 1993). Recently, feminists have been attracted to the work of Foucault and others which emphasizes that although physical bodies exist, bodies are primarily social constructions (e.g., Bordo, 1988). Looking on the…
Thanks for the memory: Memory Books as a Methodological Resource in Biographical Research
The article describes the evolution of the 'memory book', an innovative method for biographical research. In the first part of the article, we explain the origins of the method, tracing our own journey from conducting memory work as a research group to the creation of memory books as a method to be used alongside interviews in a longitudinal qualitative study of young people's transitions to adulthood. In the second part of the article, we map th…
Pleasure, Pressure and Power: Some Contradictions of Gendered Sexuality
The AIDS epidemic has encouraged public discussion of safer sex, but heterosexual young women have to negotiate sexual relationships with men in situations in which sex is defined largely in terms of men's needs and which lack notions of a positive female sexuality or female desires. Analysis of data from the Women, Risk and AIDS Project is interpreted to show both the range of pressures on young women to engage in sexual practices which are risk…
Spectacles of intimacy? Mapping the moral landscape of teenage social media
This paper explores young people's expressed concerns about privacy in the context of a highly mediated cultural environment, mapping social media practices against axes of visibility and participation. Drawing on interdisciplinary conceptual resources from both the humanities and social sciences, we use ‘spectacles of intimacy’ to conceptualise breaches of privacy, mapping an emergent moral landscape for young people that moves beyond concerns w…
Situated Affect in Traveling Data: Tracing Processes of Meaning Making in Qualitative Research
This article brings psychosocial methods into conversation with methodological and ethical debates arising from the reuse of qualitative research material, and with issues of ethnographic practice. Our empirical grounding came from the psychosocial technique of reading research texts aloud in a group, listening in an affectively attuned way, and sharing our responses. The texts we revisited-infant observation notes of interactions between a young…
Dream On: The Logic of Sexual Practice
This paper explores the structure of British young peoples' values concerning sexual experience and parenthood within a social context of individualization. Drawing on a conceptual framework derived from the work of Bourdieu, it introduces the idea of a 'logic of sexual practice', arguing that differences in attitudes towards sexual experience and early parenthood can be understood in terms of the particular economy of values of a community. The …
Longitudinal qualitative studies and the reflexive self
This paper reviews the utility of the framework offered by Giddens' 1991 work Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in a Late Modern Age, for the analysis of longitudinal qualitative studies. Working from two different longitudinal qualitative data sets, the authors explore the extent to which the notion of the 'reflexive project of self' and associated concepts might be operationalized to assist with the analysis and interpretation of em…
Moral Rhetoric and Public Health Pragmatism: The Recent Politics of Sex Education
Sex education seems to be an inherently problematic area of social policy, highlighting as it does tensions both within and between political traditions. The controversy that surrounds the development of policy in this area is testament to the complex interplay of political ideologies that signifies the boundaries of state intervention. School sex education, along with law on abortion and censorship, mark the political front line between the pers…
Narrative sense-making and prospective social action: Methodological challenges and new directions
The ways in which humans narratively make sense of their lives shape how they navigate the future. At least, that is what prominent philosophers like Sartre, Ricoeur and MacIntyre proposed. Philosophically this idea has roots in the long-standing thesis of mimesis; like art imitates life and life imitates art in the Aristotelian sense, so do life and stories imitate each other (Bruner, 1987). Despite the tenacity of the idea, relatively little re…
Storying qualitative longitudinal research: Sequence, Voice and Motif
We suggest here that the analysis, interpretation and representation of qualitative longitudinal (QL) data requires methodological innovation leading to new forms of representation that elude the usual temporality of writing research. To illustrate this argument, we outline a case history method-in-process developed to condense intensive volumes of biographical data generated over 12 years, and deal with the intersection of different timescapes t…
Generational research: Between historical and sociological imaginations
This paper reflects on Julia Brannen’s contribution to the development of theory and methods for intergenerational research. The discussion is contextualised within a contemporary ‘turn to time’ within sociology, involving tensions and synergies between sociological and historical imagination. These questions are informed by a juxtaposition of Brannen’s four-generation study of family change and social historian Angela Davis’s exploration women a…
An Adult Thing'? Young People's Perspectives on the Heterosexual Age of Consent
Historically, the heterosexual age of consent in Britain has enshrined in law an asymmetrically gendered model of sexual agency. This legislation is currently under review as part of a wider review of the law on sexual offences premised on gender neutrality. In this article young people's own perspectives are explored, through discussion of the proposition that the age of consent for heterosexuals should be lowered to 14. The ensuing focus-group …
Making the Long View: Perspectives on Context from a Qualitative Longitudinal (QL) Study
Questions of context and reflexivity have been central to recent debates about the archiving and re-use of qualitative data but these questions have been understood in different ways. In this paper, we suggest that our experiences of attempting to analyse, interpret, write-up and, more recently, archive the (prospective and retrospective) biographical data we have collected over the decade 1996–2006, can shed useful light on these questions. Firs…
Sex, gender and power: Young women's sexuality in the shadow of Aids
While the incidence of HIV infection and AIDS amongst non drug injecting heterosexuals is currently low in the UK, epidemiological evidence suggests that this situation may be short lived. The sexual practices of young heterosexuals will then be crucial in determining the extent of the epidemic. Drawing on feminist theory, we argue that if we are to understand young people's sexual relationships we must attend to the power relations within which …
Risk, power and the possibility of pleasure: Young women and safer sex
This paper draws on the work of the Women Risk and AIDS Project (WRAP) which was undertaken by the authors working collectively. It reports on data from a sociological study of the sexual beliefs and practices of two samples each of 75 young women between 16 and 21 in the cities of London and Manchester in the UK. The period of data collection was 1988-1990. The paper sets out the methods used by the WRAP team and locates this research process wi…
Pleasure, Pressure and Power: Some Contradictions of Gendered Sexuality
The AIDS epidemic has encouraged public discussion of safer sex, but heterosexual young women have to negotiate sexual relationships with men in situations in which sex is defined largely in terms of men's needs and which lack notions of a positive female sexuality or female desires. Analysis of data from the Women, Risk and AIDS Project is interpreted to show both the range of pressures on young women to engage in sexual practices which are risk…
Moral Rhetoric and Public Health Pragmatism: The Recent Politics of Sex Education
Sex education seems to be an inherently problematic area of social policy, highlighting as it does tensions both within and between political traditions. The controversy that surrounds the development of policy in this area is testament to the complex interplay of political ideologies that signifies the boundaries of state intervention. School sex education, along with law on abortion and censorship, mark the political front line between the pers…
Power and Desire: The Embodiment of Female Sexuality
In recent years the study of the body has blossomed from a neglected area of social science to a focus of attention from feminists and others (e.g., Turner, 1984; Featherstone etal. 1991, Sawicki, 1991; Shilling, 1991; Scott and Morgan, 1993). Recently, feminists have been attracted to the work of Foucault and others which emphasizes that although physical bodies exist, bodies are primarily social constructions (e.g., Bordo, 1988). Looking on the…
Deconstructing virginity - young people's accounts of first sex
In their first (hetero)sexual experience, young people are enticed into the gendered practices, meanings and power relations of heterosexuality. This paper draws on findings from two primarily qualitative studies of young people's sexual practices and understandings: the Women, Risk and AIDS Project and the Men, Risk and AIDS Project. The paper suggest that for young men, first (hetero)sex is an empowering moment through which agency and identity…
Dream On: The Logic of Sexual Practice
This paper explores the structure of British young peoples' values concerning sexual experience and parenthood within a social context of individualization. Drawing on a conceptual framework derived from the work of Bourdieu, it introduces the idea of a 'logic of sexual practice', arguing that differences in attitudes towards sexual experience and early parenthood can be understood in terms of the particular economy of values of a community. The …
Catching on, wising up and learning from your mistakes: Young people's accounts of moral development
No Abstract
In touch: Young people, communication and technologies
This paper explores the place of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the everyday lives of young people with a focus on the emergence of new and transitory cultures of sociality associated with the use of the mobile phone. It explores how differences of class and culture shape the meaning and use of mobile telephones, distinguishing between the phone as a commodity within material culture and as a medium of social capital, most a…
Young people, social change and the negotiation of moral authority
This paper presents some of the main findings of the study ‘Youth values: identity, diversity and social change’, focusing on the ways in which young people aged between 11 and 16 negotiate moral authority. It begins by discussing young people's perceptions of social change, identifying narratives of both progress and decline. The structure of young people's values are then briefly described, including differences relating to gender, location, so…
Imagined Adulthood: Resources, plans and contradictions
In this paper we illustrate the contradictory consequences of female individualization by exploring young people’s imagined futures, drawing on an analysis of ‘lifelines’ collected as part of an ongoing longitudinal qualitative study of young people’s transitions to adulthood. We discuss the method and compare lifelines across the sample. We suggest that while there are areas of consensus (such as the hetero-normative goal of marriage and childre…
Critical Moments: Choice, Chance and Opportunity in Young People's Narratives of Transition
The 'Inventing Adulthoods' study seeks to document transitions to adulthood reported by over 100 young people living in five contrasting communities in the UK over a five-year period. A principal aim of the study is to identify 'critical moments' in young people's biographies and to explore how these moments are implicated in processes of social inclusion and exclusion. This article reports on an analysis of the first of three rounds of one-to-on…
Hindsight, foresight and insight: The challenges of longitudinal qualitative research
This paper describes a UK based longitudinal qualitative study following approximately 100 young people over 9 years. It provides an overview of the research design, methods of data collection and analysis as well as reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of the strategies employed. We focus on the value of a devolved research design, complementary cross-section and temporal analytic approaches and the effects of being involved in a longitudi…
Longitudinal qualitative studies and the reflexive self
This paper reviews the utility of the framework offered by Giddens' 1991 work Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in a Late Modern Age, for the analysis of longitudinal qualitative studies. Working from two different longitudinal qualitative data sets, the authors explore the extent to which the notion of the 'reflexive project of self' and associated concepts might be operationalized to assist with the analysis and interpretation of em…
The Male in the Head: Young People, Heterosexuality and Power
This book is the fruit of ten years' research, and presents combined findings from the Women, Risk and AIDS Project (WRAP) and the smallerscale Men, Risk and AIDS Project (MRAP). These projects were based on interviews with young people between the ages of 16 and 21, conducted in the UK in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As the authors explain in their opening chapter, the initial impetus for the research was a concern with HIV and safer sex, par…
Imagining Gendered Adulthood: Anxiety, Ambivalence, Avoidance and Anticipation
In this article, the authors draw on two qualitative, longitudinal studies of young people’s transitions to adulthood and how they construct these transitions over time in social, cultural and material terms. The authors focus on the hopes, anxieties and imagined futures of young women. They discuss the individualization thesis, and the contradiction for female individualization between expectations of equality and the reality of inequality betwe…
Inventing Adulthoods: A Biographical Approach to Understanding Youth Citizenship
Traditionally adulthood and citizenship have been synonymous. Yet adulthood is changing. In this paper we explore how young people's evolving understandings of adulthood may contribute towards an understanding of citizenship within the broader context of increasingly extended and fragmented transitions. The paper draws on a unique qualitative longitudinal data set in which 100 young people, from contrasting social backgrounds in the United Kingdo…
An Adult Thing'? Young People's Perspectives on the Heterosexual Age of Consent
Historically, the heterosexual age of consent in Britain has enshrined in law an asymmetrically gendered model of sexual agency. This legislation is currently under review as part of a wider review of the law on sexual offences premised on gender neutrality. In this article young people's own perspectives are explored, through discussion of the proposition that the age of consent for heterosexuals should be lowered to 14. The ensuing focus-group …
Between cosmopolitanism and the locals: Mobility as a resource in the transition to adulthood
How useful is the distinction between cosmopolitans and locals in understanding the place of mobility and travel within contemporary youth transition? In this article we draw on a qualitative longitudinal study of young people in the UK, suggesting that localities have their own particular economy of mobility, operating at levels of the material, cultural and fantasy. In different localities young people are tied to the immediacy of physical and …
Special Feature: (Re)claiming the social
Over recent years, the 'social' has been reclaimed in different strands of academic debate. In this paper, we facilitate a conversation between three of these strands - feminist theory, late modern sociology and social capital theory - to draw attention to the problematic nature of the claims that social capital theories make for feminist theory and politics. We introduce two papers, by Lisa Adkins and Barbara Misztal, which provide distinct but …
Thanks for the memory: Memory Books as a Methodological Resource in Biographical Research
The article describes the evolution of the 'memory book', an innovative method for biographical research. In the first part of the article, we explain the origins of the method, tracing our own journey from conducting memory work as a research group to the creation of memory books as a method to be used alongside interviews in a longitudinal qualitative study of young people's transitions to adulthood. In the second part of the article, we map th…
Making the Long View: Perspectives on Context from a Qualitative Longitudinal (QL) Study
Questions of context and reflexivity have been central to recent debates about the archiving and re-use of qualitative data but these questions have been understood in different ways. In this paper, we suggest that our experiences of attempting to analyse, interpret, write-up and, more recently, archive the (prospective and retrospective) biographical data we have collected over the decade 1996–2006, can shed useful light on these questions. Firs…
The Qualitative Longitudinal Case History: Practical, Methodological and Ethical Reflections
This paper describes the development of 'case histories' from a qualitative longitudinal data set that followed 100 young people's transitions to adulthood over a ten year period. The paper describes two stages in the analytic process: first, the forging of a case history from a longitudinal archive and second, bringing case histories into conversation with each other. The paper emphasises two aspects of a qualitative longitudinal data set: the l…
Acting out: Rebellion with a cause
Conversation: Reading between the lines
Sociology (45 works) · Psychology (34 works) · Gender Studies (29 works) · Social science (27 works) · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics (27 works) · Political science (20 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Qualitative research (13 works) · Social Psychology (13 works)