Rethinking the Youth Phase of the Life-course: The Case for Emerging Adulthood?

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Imported on 2024-05-07 21:32

⭐ Important

• & Jeffery Arnett’s theory of ‘Emerging Adulthood’. This argues for recognition of a new stage of the life-course between adolescence and adulthood reflecting the extension of youth transitions to independence brought about by globalization and technological change. (p. 367)
• & However, the rich theorizing of the same manifestations of social change in young people’s experience in European Youth Studies appear to have been largely overlooked by Arnett. (p. 367)
• & The argument is exemplified by age-30 cohort comparisons across three British longitudinal studies starting in 1946, 1958 and 1970, demonstrating rising opportunities accompanied by increased social inequality. (p. 367)
• & Stanley Hall, the ‘father’ of adolescence research, writing in 1904, actually saw the adolescent period as terminating around age 25. Restriction to a much shorter period post-puberty in the teens was, according to Arnett, probably a product of convenience and practicality. Young people were tied to the education system until age 18 (high school graduation); hence were easily accessible for research. This was one of the factors that led to the use of 18 as the delimiting age for adolescence. (p. 368)
• & The idea of Emerging Adulthood, if not the label, has been discussed in European social science for some time*/albeit within a different theoretical framework. In the 1980s German social scientists were referring to the extension of the socially constructed ‘youth phase’ of the life-course (Hurrelman 1988, 1989; Gaiser & Muller 1989; Zinneker 1990; Heinz 1990, 1991). (p. 368)
• & Notable British contributions to this line of theorizing can be seen in such ideas as ‘quasi-citizenship’ (Jones & Wallace 1992), ‘policy obstacles’ (Coles 1995, 2000), ‘structured individualization’ (Roberts et al. 1994; Furlong & Cartmell 1997) and ‘underclass’ or ‘status zero’ youth (McDonald 1997; Williamson 1997). (p. 368)
• & In this theoretical framework, structural factors are seen more in terms of environmental influences and constraints in the way of life-goals rather than as shaping, in a fundamental way, roles and identities to match modern conditions. (p. 369)
• & Another way of looking at the phenomenon of extended transition is in terms of ‘capital accumulation’. The human capital identified with educational achievement and gaining qualifications during compulsory schooling (Becker 1975) gives way in late modern society to capital accumulation through lifelong learning and Journal of Youth Studies 36 (p. 369)
• & occupational profile-building by gaining experience in a variety of occupational roles. (p. 370)
• & The surveys reveal a striking rise in both the level of qualifications achieved over successive cohorts, and the rising engagement with post-secondary education in the pursuit of university degrees. Thus only 34 per cent of the men and 19 per cent of the women in the 1946 cohort had achieved the equivalent of high school graduation, compared with 53 per cent of the men and 39 per cent of the women in the 1958 cohort and 54 per cent of the men and 46 per cent of the women in the 1970 cohort. At the other end of the scale, nearly one-half of the men and women in the 1946 cohort had left school at the minimum age of 16 without qualifications, compared with less than one in six of the two more recent cohorts. (p. 373)
• & These findings suggest that the relentless pursuit of qualification and career may be bought, to a certain extent, at the expense of social cohesion. But is this really true, or is there another factor that needs to be taken into account? Apart from looking at changing levels of engagement in education and the community, the analysis pursued differentiation across the sets of structural categories that define the social strata of society. Arnett (2000) refers a lot to differentiation, but except for a few sentences in one paragraph at the end of his paper pays little attention to some of the structural forces that might underlie it. His examination in his book of four emerging adults’ life histories (Arnett 2004, chapter 9), for example, is cast almost exclusively in terms of individual agency responses to particular sets of economic and social and economic circumstances. (p. 374)
• & First, with respect to gender there was undoubtedly a narrowing of the gap between young men and young women in educational opportunities and achievement, with young women catching up their male counterparts. There was also a striking reduction in gender inequality with respect to occupational outcomes as reflected in earnings; although a sizable gap still remained (Figure 3) (Dearden et al. 2003). In this sense the strong equal opportunities policies prominent in Britain since the 1980s appear to have been paying off, at least in part, for women. (p. 375)
• & With respect to social class, qualification level and, particularly, family economic status, the picture was rather different. Extended participation in education and occupational achievement was concentrated in the most advantaged sections of society, and was also strongly related to qualifications gained. Here the gap between the haves and the have-nots was actually getting wider, with a substantial minority of young people at the bottom end of the social scale, falling substantially behind the rest. (p. 375)
• & Until the 1980s failing to get qualifications was no hindrance to getting work in Britain, because the labour market absorbed virtually all such unqualified young people into the large number of unskilled jobs that existed then (Bynner 2001). In the modern labour market, opportunities for the unqualified and unskilled are more limited. They face the prospect of ‘patchwork careers’ characterized by part-time and casualized jobs interspersed with periods of unemployment. Young women frequently drop out of the labour market altogether, typically opting for early partnership and parenthood instead. (p. 377)
• & The idea of emerging adulthood is useful in drawing attention to the impact on youth transitions of the forces of technological transformation and globalization through the increasing premium placed by employers on qualifications and the greater uncertainty about the future that this implies. The concept also draws attention to postponement for many*/but particularly the more educated*/of the commitments involved in partnership and parenthood in favour of a single lifestyle sustained for much longer than in the past. Changing relations within the family are also notable with the tensions of adolescence giving way to a mature relationship with parents*/ seen now more in the mode of trusted friends and confidantes. On the agency dimension, emerging adults have available, at least in principle, a more extended set of opportunities than at any other time. However, opportunity involves choice not all of which is positive, especially if past choices inhibit later ones and when the complexity of the options available means that diminishing returns set in (Schwartz 2004). The entry points to emerging adulthood are also different depending on prior achievements and the constraints these impose on the free range of life-course plans. Whether it is helpful to develop new terminology to describe what is happening rather than elaborate further the concept of youth as extending more widely across the lifespan is more debatable. The homogenizing features of developmental stages also tend to play down the old structural determinacies and polarizing aspects of young people’s experience that, if anything, as the British comparisons show, are getting stronger in late modern conditions. (p. 380)