Changing Contexts, Critical Moments And Transitions: Interim Outcomes For Children And Young People Living Through Involuntary Relocation

The aim of this article is to understand how involuntary relocation - in the context of transformational regeneration - affects children and young people's (CYP) interim outcomes through its impacts on residential contexts, and its intersections with their transitions and critical moments. Findings are based on a longitudinal qualitative study of 13 families' (comprising 32 CYP) lives as they relocated from high rise flats to different housing and neighbourhoods over three years. Relocation altered two key contexts directly, home and neighbourhood, and may have indirectly altered the other contexts - peers, school and family. However, we found there were as many non-relocation related factors as relocation factors associated with outcomes, and a number of significant critical moments affecting CYP's lives. Whilst relocation can seem the big thing' from the point of view of practitioners and researchers, from the perspective of CYP, it can seem a small part of the much bigger picture of change in their lives.