This article examines the interplay between vulnerability and agency among Zimbabwean youths migrating unaccompanied to South Africa. Although situated in precarious situations, these young people demonstrate short-term tactical agency, making crucial decisions to navigate their immediate circumstances. Based on 33 interviews and three focus group discussions conducted with young (12–17 years) Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa, the research explores the drivers of migration, the challenges young migrants face and the strategies they use to address the challenges. Despite facing dangers, such as exploitation and violence, these young people demonstrate tactical agency in navigating immediate survival needs, securing shelter, food and safety. These findings underscore the dynamic relationship between vulnerability and agency, highlighting how young people on the move navigate their circumstances even within constrained environments. The article calls for a comprehensive understanding of youth migration that recognizes both the risks faced by and the agency of these young migrants.
Rap is among the popular cultural forms most tightly bound to specific conditions of class, race and marginality, yet middle-class secondary school students in China, who do not share these conditions in their original form, have taken it up as a creative practice of their own. Drawing on interviews with 10 student rap enthusiasts, their published works and observational data from online communities, this study reveals a process of cultural reconstruction unfolding across three dimensions. In terms of content, students recast marginality by foregrounding adolescent experiences of academic pressure, powerlessness within family hierarchies and emotional silencing. In spatial practice, they distribute their engagement with rap across digital platforms and school stages, reconfiguring the street-based community model central to traditional hip-hop. In terms of value orientation, young creators maintain rap’s critical voice while refusing the binary between resistance and conformity, grounding their practice in Chinese cultural traditions and lived experience rather than borrowed oppositional stances. The framework proposed here suggests that the plasticity of a cultural form and the social coordinates of its participants jointly shape how it is reorganized. Rap’s capacity to sustain such reorganization speaks to both its adaptability as a cultural form and the creative agency of young people who actively reshape the cultures they encounter.
This article offers a detailed and methodologically informed account of collecting research data through chatting with young people on the Discord platform. Discord, a popular communication platform among youth, was used in this study to gather data via online chats. The article explores the methodological considerations of using a chat-based platform to collect data from young people about their experiences with family work, a home-based social service for families. The study adopts a co-research approach, involving two young adults with personal experience in child welfare services. The article provides insights into the unique features of online chat-based data collection and its implications for research involving children and youth. It highlights both the opportunities and challenges of data collection through online chatting, focusing on the researchers’ decisions made at the beginning, during, at the end of and after the chat discussions on Discord.
In this article, we analyse the skills and knowledge of young people using the urban space by introducing the concept of ‘urban capital’. We combine two theoretical approaches: the Chicago School-inspired approaches to young people’s street cultures and Bourdieu’s notion of capitals. Our research data derives from the qualitative longitudinal Youth in Time research project. The sub-data utilized consist of 32 interactive map workshops conducted with 74 secondary school students in the ninth grade (15- to 16-year-olds) living in or near three urban localities in different parts of Finland. In our analysis, we focus on how young people utilize urban space by using their cultural and social capital. We explore how they gradually build their knowledge about local neighbourhoods and how their mobilities develop. Our results show that young people gain urban capital socially, by interacting and sharing stories about how to use urban spaces, how to get around and which places are safe and fun or to be avoided.
Volunteering offers young people valuable opportunities for personal and social development, yet social inequalities in access and participation persist. This study examines how ethnicity/migration background, gender and social status shape formal volunteering among Flemish youth, with special attention to how these characteristics intersect. Using survey data from students (age: 15–20) in urban areas and a rural control group ( n = 2,354), we apply a multilevel analysis of individual heterogeneity and discriminatory accuracy (MAIDHA) analysis and multilevel logistic models to analyse individual, intersectional and interaction patterns. Results show clear differences in formal voluntary engagement by migration background but no clear differences based on social status or gender. However, intersectional analyses nuance this general pattern, revealing barriers that remain hidden when characteristics are studied separately. By highlighting these intersectional dynamics, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of social inequalities in youth volunteering and underscores the importance of moving beyond single-axis analyses.
This article examines how student indebtedness shapes the transition to adulthood within Turkey’s familialist welfare regime. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 19 university graduates who received student loans, it reveals that debt is not merely a financial burden but a relational condition mediated by labour market precarity and familial dependence. While familial support helps young people navigate unemployment and low-income jobs, it also delays autonomy, producing ‘uneven pathways’ into adulthood. Debt reinforces intergenerational dependencies and deepens existing inequalities, particularly for those without stable employment or family resources. The findings show that in Turkey’s welfare regime—marked by limited public support and strong familial expectations—debt operates as both a survival strategy and a constraint. The study contributes to youth and welfare literature by situating debt within the cultural and economic logics of the Southern welfare model, highlighting how young people negotiate independence and familial connectivity under structural pressures.
This article explores how Gen Z activists in the US Southwest navigate 'outside' and 'inside' forms of political activism and how these experiences shape their political efficacy. We use participant-chosen social media posts as photo elicitation alongside serial reflection interviews to examine the motivations, behaviours and aspirations of 10 youth activists aged 17-26. Activists reported beginning their political journey through outside activism, such as protests, campaign volunteering and online campaigns, building strong internal political efficacy (IPE) by affirming their identities and the ability to resist injustice. Many then crossed into political spaces by running for office, leading policy-focused organizations and engaging directly with policymakers. These experiences strengthened their external political efficacy (EPE) by testing whether and how institutions responded to youth-led change. We found that activism and confidence created a virtuous circle: early activism boosted confidence, leading to more involvement, while navigating formal institutions not only revealed structural barriers and tokenism but also provided opportunities to influence policy and stay engaged. Our findings underscore the hybrid nature of contemporary youth activism, highlight the different paths through which IPE and EPE develop, and offer educators and policymakers guidance to support young people as they shift from protesting to participating in politics.
Attitudes towards transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) people have become generally more accepting over the last few years. However, there have also been signs of countermovement and a global increase in hate-motivated violence against TGD individuals. The accumulation of violence experiences for TGD people begins already in the early years, highlighting the vulnerability of TGD youth. This study examines changes in physical violent victimization among TGD adolescents (12- to 17-year-olds) from 2017 to 2023 by utilizing data from the Finnish School Health Promotion studies (N = 534,222). We examined the prevalences and temporal changes in experiences of physical violent victimization by cross-tabulations with pairwise z-tests and binary logistic regression analysis. We also examined the help-receiving tendencies of the different gender categories. The results indicate that TGD youth face higher rates of physical violent victimization than their cisgender peers. However, the gap between these groups seems to be narrowing, as are the differences between the gender minority groups. TGD adolescents are more likely to need and receive help for experiences of physical violent victimization, yet they also report more unmet needs, particularly from their parents. Despite the favourable trends in prevalences, TGD adolescents remain disproportionately affected, highlighting the need for better support systems and constructive public discussion on the well-being of TGD adolescents.
The aim of this article is to explore how place and physical space are perceived by girls and young women living in two neighbourhoods marked as marginalized and how they orientate in urban spaces and their everyday lives. Data were collected through teller-focused, walk-along and photo-elicitation interviews with twenty-one 13- to 22-year-old girls and young women in racially diverse neighbourhoods in two Swedish cities and analysed using queer phenomenology and conceptions of space. Three themes emerge: orientations in everyday life, place as the Other, and belonging and the contestation of space. The girls' and young women's everyday life movements are understood as voluntary and forced into different directions in urban spaces. They orientate in spaces where class and racial boundaries divide people and places, as the local neighbourhoods and inhabitants are stigmatized as the Other. However, these boundaries are contested by the girls taking pride in where they live, their Muslim identity and forward orientations in life.
This research analyses Spanish teenagers' perceptions of political polarization, the role of social media in political debate and the normalization of hate speech in digital environments through four focus groups with 26 participants aged 16-17 from different regions of Spain. The results reveal a paradox: although adolescents recognize the importance of politics, they tend to disengage from political debates due to their association with conflict and social risk. Fear of judgement and exclusion leads them to restrict conversations to trusted circles, reinforcing ideological bubbles. In general, they do not trust schools as places to mitigate polarization. Gender differences in political engagement are modest: some female participants express emotional detachment from politics, fearing potential interpersonal conflicts. In contrast, male participants generally view ideological conflict as an inherent and acceptable part of democratic discourse. Social media, especially TikTok and Instagram, subtly shape their opinions through entertainment, contributing to the normalization of polarized narratives. Regional differences also emerge, with greater political engagement in nationalist contexts such as Catalonia and the Basque Country. This study highlights the importance of taking gender and regional context into account when fostering democratic engagement among young people.
Eco-anxiety has emerged as a significant psychological phenomenon in response to the climate crisis, characterized by a range of negative emotions and cognitive-emotional impairment. Young people are particularly vulnerable to eco-anxiety, yet research on their lived experience of navigating this distress is limited. Using semi-structured interviews (n = 15) and interpretive phenomenological analysis guided by Pihkala's process model, this study qualitatively explored how young Australians (aged 18-24 years) experience and adapt to eco-anxiety. The analysis revealed a dynamic three-stage process. First, participants confronted a heavy emotional toll characterized by anger, powerlessness and despair. Second, they navigated this overwhelm by employing complicated coping strategies, combining emotional distancing for self-preservation with individual pro-environmental actions to manage anxiety. Finally, participants were actively rerouting their lives, with eco-anxiety profoundly reshaping major life decisions, particularly regarding career paths and the choice to not have children. The findings illustrate that eco-anxiety for young people is not a static state but an ongoing process of emotional, psychological and practical adaptation to the realities of the climate crisis.
Many people who inject drugs begin before 18, while they are still legally minors/children. This age group has not been a specific focus in youth harm reduction research. We explore thresholds for service access for under 18s who inject drugs from the perspectives of both people who inject drugs and service providers. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 19 people in Sweden, Switzerland and Wales who began injecting drugs before turning 18, exploring their experiences at the time, and the interviews were analysed thematically. Common themes across the three countries were age barriers, fear of discovery, informal harm reduction strategies, the appropriateness of adult services and difficulties in the transition to adulthood. Focus groups were conducted with harm reduction, drug treatment and social work professionals, and analysed deductively based on the previously generated themes. Despite local differences in law and policy, thematic commonalities across three high-income settings provide important points of departure when considering barriers to and enablers of access to services for under 18s who inject drugs.
This article explores how the COVID-19 pandemic affected mobile young people's experiences of the temporality of transitions to adulthood. Young people are today the most mobile population globally, and mobility has necessarily become integral to youth-to-adulthood transitions. By adopting transition temporalities as an analytical key, we consider the impact of pandemic immobility on the transition experiences of young movers who, when the pandemic hit, found themselves stuck not only in place but also in time. Drawing on in-depth interviews undertaken during the pandemic with transnationally mobile young people (aged 18-30) who left Australia for abroad or moved to Australia from abroad, we explore the temporal impact on transitions of the sudden disruption to their mobility. We examine how experiences of 'decelerated' or 'accelerated' transitions, and 'lost' and 'suspended' time, were reflected through refigured staging of adulthood milestones and pathways and changing temporal imaginaries of mobile life pathways. The immobility imposed by the pandemic, which occurred in the midst of a study on youth mobility, became a revealing test case: the absence of mobility highlighted the crucial role of transnational mobility in shaping young people's transitions to adulthood and imagined futures.
Agency (i.e., the ability to act intentionally within the constraints of a given social context) is an important aspect of constructing a narrative identity. For young people in secure care, their freedom is highly restricted, which may hinder their abilities to act and feel agentic. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine how agency was expressed in stories written by young people in secure care in Sweden. A thematic narrative analysis of 53 narratives resulted in three main themes-change in perspective, engagement with the outer world and resistance-indicating that agency can be expressed despite a constrained environment and may include both adaptive and harmful behaviours. Based on the findings, it is suggested that key elements of adaptive agency in young people are social relationships and trust, as well as support of their achievement and competence.
The years of youth are particularly formative, and young people can feel a strong identification with the place where they grow up. However, for young people in multi-ethnic working-class-dominated urban neighbourhoods, their perceptions often come in conflict with the surrounding society's negative representations. This article draws on research with 40 young women about their experiences of three multi-ethnic working-class-dominated neighbourhoods in Stockholm, Sweden. The aim is to analyse the complexity in the women's narratives of navigating between feelings of place-based belonging and their strategies to resist stigmatizing discourses. Their narratives reflect a tension between belonging and a longing to move out to move on. Therefore, the article concludes that we need to acknowledge that young women can have a strong identification with the community and the neighbourhood while still imagining their future elsewhere, because of class inequality, racialization processes and expectations of young women to be adaptable and flexible.
In Sweden, gangster rap emerged in 2018 as a new cultural expression within the national hip-hop scene. Despite its recent origin, it has become a significant part of youth culture, particularly popular among young people from diverse social backgrounds. This makes it possible to understand young people's preferences not only as personal expressions of taste but also as symbolic acts linked to social position and identity. This study therefore analyses interviews with 15- to 18-year-olds from various social environments, using conceptualizations from Pierre Bourdieu. The aim is to (a) analyse paradoxes and tensions in youths' discourse on Swedish gangster rap, and (b) explore how these relate to socio-economic status. Results reveal how gangster rap generates intergenerational and entangled distinctions, alongside cultural ambiguities in youths' perceptions. These tensions highlight gangster rap as simultaneously mainstream and exclusive, authentic yet exaggerated, fictional but relatable. The study contributes to understanding the complex ways young people engage with gangster rap, showing that it fosters ambivalent cultural modes and entangled distinctions that cut across conventional boundaries and challenge established class positions.
Leaving the parents' home has long been seen as a commonly considered indication of adulthood. However, the scientific view on the transition to adulthood in modern society is revised, and the role of relocation from parents is changing. Based on the concepts of autonomy, flourishing and emerging adulthood, the present study examines young adults' reasons for leaving their family homes using a thematic analysis of 24 interviews with respondents aged 18-25. We identified four types of narratives, which varied by the extent of autonomy and the quality of flourishing: lack of relocation as an impediment, lack of relocation as a personal decision, relocation as a challenge, and relocation as a responsible choice and passing a test. Mostly, the source of flourishing is not in the relocation itself, but in the associated social and career growth, which leads to positive emotions, engagement, relationships, achievement and the formation of personal meaning.
Considerable attention has been paid to promote young people's participation in civic and political organizations. Despite organizations' overarching assertion to be inclusive to all youth, participation is still low and unevenly distributed. To explore this disparity between organizational aims and participating youth, 85 young participants from 19 Danish civic youth organizations were interviewed. Based on a micro-sociological analysis of participants' own everyday practices, three distinctly different participatory modes were identified: (a) outward-facing, (b) inward-facing and (c) managerial modes. Against this backdrop, organizations' initiatives to give access to participation for newcomers who represent minorities in the given context are explored. The analysis shows that accessibility to these three participatory modes varies significantly-from quite open to nearly closed. Findings point to the importance of future studies and organizational endeavours to focus not solely on participation in numbers but also on what modes of participation minority newcomers have access to within the organizations.
Accusations of political passivity are often directed towards citizens, especially the youth. This study challenges the prevailing narrative by exploring the latent dimensions of political participation, and in particular the role of 'standby citizens', that is, those who are politically interested yet non-participatory. We propose that these individuals engage in behavioural activism when they perceive governmental actions as failing to meet their needs and demands. To test this hypothesis, we utilized a longitudinal sample of adolescents, classifying them into four distinct groups: active, standby, unengaged and other. We examined the transitions between these groups over time. Our findings indicate that standby adolescents are significantly more likely to shift towards active participation and less likely to become completely disengaged. Specifically, those who moved from standby to active status reported a significant decline in satisfaction with government performance over time, while their counterparts who remained in the standby mode did not show such changes.
