The pronounced increase in the number of young people struggling with mental health and wellbeing continues to puzzle researchers, politicians and practitioners. Discussions around this seem to fluctuate between individualizing understandings of the problem matter and more structural, institutional and cultural ones, calling for research exploring the role of the latter. In this paper, we present analyses of how broader societal frameworks linked to acceleration, performance and psychologization affect the wellbeing of young people. Based on a longitudinal qualitative study in Denmark with 37 young men and women between the ages of 16 and 24 struggling with wellbeing, this paper unfolds structural, cultural and institutional influences on mental health issues experienced by young people. The analyses are produced using a social-analytical lens of 'diagnosis of the times' to explore how young people's subjective everyday life experiences of wellbeing and wellbeing struggles must be understood as interlinked with broader societal frameworks and expectations.

This Special Issue on Youth, Rural Places and Marginalisation, brings together nine papers from six countries - Australia, England, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden - to explore young people's experiences of living in rural locations. We focused on rural youth for two main reasons: firstly, there are relatively few sociological studies of young people's experience of rural life and, secondly, academics and policymakers have tended to frame discussions about young people and rural places in negative terms. Together the papers here use a wide range of methods - quantitative and qualitative longitudinal approaches, questionnaire surveying, face-to-face and online qualitative interviews, ethnography, visual methods, 'mobile probes', 'walk-along' and 'drive-along' interviews - in order to understand young people's everyday life. We were particularly interested in the stories of young people who appeared to resist 'the mobility imperative' and chose to stay rather than leave their rural homes. Our introduction focuses on 'rethinking concepts of staying'; 'gender and the risks of staying' and 'geographies of rural opportunities'. We conclude with a call for a sociological imagination of rural youth that avoids romanticizing narratives of 'the rural idyll' or which paints rural places and populations as backward or lacking.

Research and policy analysis often presumes a 'mobility imperative' in respect of rural youth; to 'get on' they have to 'get out'. Those who stay, therefore, tend to be depicted as socially and economically deficient, backward, lacking agency and 'left behind'. The aim of our paper is to provide a corrective to this sort of thinking. We present new, extensive, qualitative, longitudinal research conducted with fifty young men and women who have chosen to stay in rural, 'Peripheral Denmark'. Our sample were doubly marginalised; by the lack of opportunities of their localities and by their lack of progress and achievement in their school-to-work transitions.We found that young people practised an intriguing and complex emotional reflexivity about staying. Our analysis documents their entangled feelings of 'stuckness' (e.g. in relation to lack of transport and services, isolation from typical youth leisure, in on-going family commitments) and of 'stillness' (e.g. in the serenity of nature, in family belonging and in educational support). In conclusion, we suggest that the concept of 'reflexive stayers' captures these young people's lived experiences of 'stillness' and 'stuckness' and could be beneficial to future research and policy analysis on rural youth, mobility and marginalisation.

Over the past 30 years, it has been a political aim to minimise the group of young people in NEET 1 positions in Denmark. However, the number has remained relatively stable and the situation continues to call for further political attention and research knowledge. Much of the existing knowledge about young people in marginal positions is characterised by a focus on risk factors and measures that aim at preventing marginalisation in regards to education and labour market participation, whereas research that unfolds young people's own experiences in a broader everyday life perspective is scarce. In this chapter, we present such an analysis of young people in marginal positions, their experiences, and everyday lives. We use the analytical concept of action strategies, which facilitates an analysis of three different kinds of individual strategies that incorporate a broader understanding of the life situations of young people. The different strategies that emerge from the analysis are: distrust strategy, isolation strategy, and value strategy. Using this analytical design, our ambition is to provide a more differentiated picture of young people on the margins of Danish society, and how their actions intertwine with the structural conditions framing their lives.

Mistrivslen blandt unge i Danmark og en række andre europæiske lande er over de senere år steget markant, hvilket skaber en risiko for, at man generelt kommer til at tegne et stadig mere dystert billede af ungdomslivet i dag. Men går man tættere på, er billedet noget mere broget. Der er således store forskelle på, hvordan trivsel og mistrivsel tager sig ud blandt unge. Vi dykker i denne artikel ned i nuancerne og forskellene i den trivsel, mistrivsel og udsathed, som unge oplever. Med afsæt i en repræsentativ spørgeskemaundersøgelse blandt 2.080 tilfældigt udvalgte danske unge i alderen fra 16 til 25 år har vi gennemført en latent klasseanalyse, der inddeler de unge i fem grupper på baggrund af graden og karakteren af deres trivsel og mistrivsel. Analysen viser store variationer i de unges oplevelser. For én gruppe er det presset i skole og uddannelse, der dominerer deres mistrivsel. For en anden er det psykiske udfordringer, mens en tredje gruppe oplever at trives og at have det endog rigtig godt inden for alle livsområder. Analysen giver tilsammen et mere nuanceret og mindre dramatiserende indblik i trivsel og mistrivsel i ungdomslivet end det, der tegnes i den offentlige debat og påviser vigtige forskelle i, hvad den stigende mistrivsel dækker over.

Voicing and exploring young pupils’ motivation for learning is a central ambition within the field of education research, which can be strengthened through the use of visual methods. Based on a specific research project on motivation for learning and participation in and outside of school, this article explores both analytical opportunities and challenges concerning the use of visual material, such as everyday-life snapshots, as starting points for individual qualitative interviews focusing on perspectives, experiences, and everyday practices of secondary school pupils. The article shows that visual methods (participant-directed photo elicitation) in educational studies can provide access to situated narratives about both motivation and motives for (non)participation that can supplement methodological approaches such as observations and traditional qualitative interviews.

In this article we explore and develop the understanding of young people’s motives for (non)participation in lower secondary education. Based on a two-year study dominated by qualitative and explorative methods, we combine a focus on young peoples’ motives and goal orientations with a socio-cultural (and social constructivist) understanding of motivation/learning (Wenger, 1998; Wertsch, 1994). This combination allows us to explore the dynamic complexity of pupils’ motives for participation in school and look into how motivation is produced in the interplay between individual goals and motives and the learning climate within the school context (Ames, 1992; Dowson & McInerney, 2003; Maehr & Zusho, 2009; Jackson, 2006; Lemos, 2001). In the article, we identify key motivational orientations as they unfold in the social and learning processes that take place in the learning contexts young people are part of. As a mean to synthesise and highlight the complexities at play we introduce a situated model that visualises our results.

Drawing on theoretical perspectives regarding the importance of place and belonging to a place in understanding young people's lives as well as broader processes of social change and continuity, this article explores conceptions of youth as experiencedand narratedby young people living in rural areas. The article analyzes how discourses on urbanism and youth can be traced in young people's narratives about their communities and their own lives as young people; how these discourses seem to frame the young people's narratives and how they rearticulate these discourses through their accounts (Davies, 2000). In the article, we thus also focus attention on the cracks and opposing discourses that can be identified in the young people's narratives, and how they influence their relationship with their local area.

Various theories on motivation highlight specific dichotomised dimensions such as performance/learning, intrinsic/extrinsic, academic/social and so on. The five motivational orientations are developed on the basis of the young people's narratives about their motivation regarding school and learning and existing research literature and knowledge about what is central for young people's motivation. The five motivational orientations are: Knowledge motivation, mastery motivation, involvement motivation, performance motivation and, finally, relational motivation. Knowledge motivation is, thus, about reaching beyond them and being curious about the outside world; expanding their horizons and then trying to link knowledge to their own world. Even though some pupils have a strong orientation towards school and knowledge, there are also numerous examples of pupils who find it difficult to connect to different subjects or see the point of the knowledge they are supposed to acquire. One challenge is that the learning perspective in some of the more open and playful learning processes disappears for the students.

Ungdomsforskningen har aktuelt fokus på samfundsmæssige forandringstræk, der peger mod et ungdomsliv, præget af præstation. Med afsæt i tre forskningsprojekter gennemført i regi af Center for Ungdomsforskning (Nielsen, Murning & Katznelson 2017, Hutters, Nielsen & Görlich 2013, Sørensen, Grubb, Madsen & Nielsen 2011) undersøger vi, gennem empiriske nedslag, på hvilke måder orienteringen mod præstation kan genfindes som tendens på tværs af ungdomslivskontekster, og hvordan den manifesteres i unges tilblivelsesprocesser. Artiklen peger på, at præstation for nogle unge udgør en væsentlig diskursiv ressource, mens det for andre kobles til udenforskab. Trods forskelle er et fællesstræk, at de unges selvfremstillinger er forbundet til fornemmelser af aldrig at komme i mål. Self-as-portfolio er en figur, de unge må positionere sig i forhold til.