Growing Up in the 1990s: Tracks and trajectories of the ‘Rising 16’s’

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⭐ Important

• & In this study, the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), a contemporary source of longitudinal data from the early 1990s onwards, is used to demonstrate a lack of evidence of detraditionalisation, or the weakening of structural factors in determining the outcomes of young people. To the contrary, the gap between those from advantaged and less advantaged backgrounds remains wide. (p. 3)
• & The reproduction of social inequality over time is a longstanding issue but remains a highly important and relevant concern in contemporary sociology (Breen 2004;Devine 2004;Glass 1954;Goldthorpe & Jackson 2007;Goldthorpe, Llewellyn, & Payne 1980;Saunders 2010;Sorokin 1927). (p. 14)
• & Bottero states that social stratification is ‘concerned with the patterning of inequality and its enduring consequences on the lives of those who experience it’ (2005: 3). So, here, we are looking at the extent to which advantage or disadvantage is reproduced or ‘endured’ within families through the generations. Bottero argues that there is a quality of ‘persistence’ to ‘stratification’ that differs from the changeable nature of ‘inequality’; (p. 22)
• & The focus of the Cambridge Scale (a measure of stratification position formulated by the group) is on the social structures defined by ‘interaction patterns’ of friendship and marriage (Bottero 2005). This is a potentially suitable measure for this research, since measures which rely upon economic classification may be less appropriate (Bihagen 2008) for an analysis of the social and cultural circumstances of those seen as ‘outsiders’ (Blossfeld et al. 2005) in the labour market, young adults and women. (p. 23)
• & Contrasting approaches to understanding social stratification are often termed ‘structural’. This term can be explained as defining a set of classes or status groups using structural criteria, and then looking at patterns between them (Prandy 1999). The relational and structural approaches differ in terms of their view of stratification. Structurally, socially distant individuals can be very different to one another due to objective criteria linked to economic and employment circumstances; relationally, this is interpreted as rarely associating with one another (Bottero 2005). This is relevant for the present research on young people, when economic activity categorisation may not be appropriate. Those using the structural approach see the different locations of people to be within an external structure of stratification. There is also a focus on one aspect of an individual’s position, commonly economic. (p. 24)
• & Goldthorpe is arguably the most prominent sociologist within the structural tradition of stratification research, rooted in Weberian theory. The Goldthorpe scheme is a widely used grouping scheme in social mobility research, based on a structure of economic positions and will be discussed fully in Chapter 2. (p. 24)
• & Amongst its many attractive features, a further quality of the BHPS is that it allows linkage of responses from questionnaires the respondents completed as children of 11 and over before entering the full survey at 16. Again, this renders it highly opportune as a data set for use in the present research. Particularly important for this research, the British Youth Panel (BYP) was added into the BHPS in 1994 (therefore included in Waves 4 and onwards). This addition of a rotating panel of 11-15 year olds continues to be less widely exploited by researchers, but is an invaluable inclusion for social research on young people and their origins and outcomes (Gayle 2005). ‘[It] locates the young person’s experience within the household and tracks the young person into adult’s life...the BYP also plugs an important gap in the existing portfolio of British youth data’ (Gayle 2005: 34). (p. 34)
• & In this project, focus is centred on those young adults who are moving up from the Youth Panel, onto the adult Panel. As specified, they are often referred to as the Rising 16’s (Gayle 2005), and will be during this study. (p. 34)
• & The available datasets provide details on pre-age 16 information. For example, the young person’s intentions in adult life, their aspirations, and information about the relationships with friends and family members are amongst data collected in the BYP. (p. 35)
• & Aside from the unique importance of the survey’s youth panel, the most convincing attribute of the BHPS is simply its longitudinal design. (p. 35)
• & ‘longitudinal data allow models to be constructed that are better able to take into account some of the complexities of the way in which people conduct their lives and of the influences on that process’ ( 1994: 4) (p. 36)
• & The BHPS contains very high quality longitudinal data. Amongst the benefits of longitudinal data, in general and specifically in terms of this project, the reliability of the records over time is more consistent and it allows the study of transitions, sequences and durations. Using the annual BHPS, there are presently 18 time points, or waves, available (17 waves are used in this research). There are vast quantities of data collected on sample members, both cross sectional and temporal; and, in the case of the BHPS, data on their households. (p. 36)
• & Attrition in the survey arises, but rates are often considered relatively low, especially when compared to the YCS (p. 37)
• & ‘The sociology of social mobility has had practically no female dimension; it has been the study of men, mirroring the broader field of social stratification in this respect’ (Hayes & Miller 1993: 653). (p. 37)
• & Dale et al summarised that women’s absence has previously been ‘assumed rather than explained and excused’ (Dale, Gilbert, & Arber 1985: 385). (p. 37)
• & Blau and Duncan ( 1967) failed to include women altogether, as did the Oxford Mobility Study; and other studies, such as the Scottish Mobility Study, only used wives as their female sample (Hayes & Miller 1993) rendering it non-random and exclusionary. As Heath (1981) states, women were conspicuous in their absence in social mobility research. (p. 38)
• & Throughout the text the sample will be referred to as the Rising 16’s, and refers to a group of respondents from the British Household Panel Survey who are part of the 1975-1991 birth cohort and have been interviewed as adults in the BHPS on more or more occasions between the period 1991-2007 (waves 1-17 of the BHPS). These young people are from the ‘Essex Original Household Sample’ in the BHPS (i.e., the original nationally representative sample of households conducted in 1991), and are known as the ‘Rising 16’s’ because they were first enumerated as children resident within original sample members’ households, but during the course of the BHPS they have aged into the adult survey (rather than entering the sample by joining a household, or being included via one of the later boost samples) (Taylor et al. 2009). (p. 53)
• & Across the BHPS, 8087 individual records of adult interviews from members of this cohort are retrievable, covering an average of almost 8 time points of interview (with 177 different individuals present across all of these time points). Beneficially, the Rising 16’s will be able to be followed for many years to come (17 waves are currently available), more so since the BHPS has been subsumed into the much larger UK Household Longitudinal Study. This presents opportunities for future comparison to take a later look at the same cohort. (p. 54)
• & Ordinarily, individuals born after 1979 will have also taken part in at least one wave of the British Youth Panel (BYP), a survey conducted within the BHPS with household members between the ages of 11-15, though only in the period 1994-2007. Therefore at this point these youths may also be referred to as the Rising 11’s (Gayle 2005). (p. 54)
• & Ryder states that ‘transformations of the social world modify people of different ages in different ways’ (1965: 861). Correspondingly, the BHPS Rising 16’s are conceived of as a unique group of individuals who have been interviewed at multiple points during their youth phase over a 17 year period. While the BHPS is not a cohort survey, we argue that it is appropriate to study the Rising 16’s as representative of a recent age cohort entering adulthood in the context of a number of shared but distinctive circumstances. The following section will detail the social, economic and political landscape against which the Rising 16’s cohort experience their youth phase transitions. (p. 55)
• & In the decades following the Second World War the vast majority of young people in the UK left education at the first opportunity. In more recent decades this situation has reversed. Official data illustrate that an increasing proportion of young people have remained in education longer (Department of Employment 1993; FEFC 2000; Social Trends 2006). Whereas, historically, only a minority of young people remained in education for long periods before entering the labour market, by the late 1980s, only a minority made an early transition straight from school-to-work (Banks et al. 1992). This general shift has been commented upon by a number of authors (especially Paterson and Raffe 1995; Biggart and Furlong 1996; Cregan 2001). (p. 55)
• & Sociologists of youth are generally in agreement that the background against which young people grew up in the closing decades of the twentieth century was transformed, and is now radically different from earlier decades (MacDonald et al.1993). It is now widely agreed that the ‘normal’ school-towork transition that characterised the ‘traditional’ rite of passage from youth to adult status has been disrupted (Irwin 1995). This has been labelled the ‘changing times consensus’ (Gayle, Lambert, & Murray 2009). Sociologists have deployed a series of adjectives such as ‘long’, ‘broken’, ‘fractured’ and ‘uneasy’, in order to describe the changing pattern of youth transitions (Craine 1997). Within the ‘changing times consensus’, authors agree that the transformation was driven by a series of interrelated social and economic changes. (p. 56)
• & The most dramatic of the economic changes was the virtual collapse of the youth labour market in the early 1980s. This key transformation received a great deal of sociological attention (see Ashton et al. 1982; Atkinson and Rees 1982; Raffe 1984, 1988; Roberts 1984, 1997; Brown and Ashton 1987; Furlong 1987; Bynner 1996; Maguire and Maguire 1997). The growing levels of youth unemployment in the 1970s and 1980s are well documented (Casson 1979; Jackson 1985; Gallie and Marsh 1994). Concurrently, there was a sharp decline in the number of apprenticeships during this period (Maguire and Maguire 1997). (p. 56)
• & This pattern of economic restructuring led to a number of policy responses, most notably the introduction of ‘youth training’ provisions (Raffe 1982, 1983; Chapman and Tooze 1987; Stoney and Lines 1987; Roberts 1984; Deakin 1996; Finn 1987; Hollands 1990). The introduction of youth training was coupled with a number of reforms to the welfare system that changed (and generally reduced) young people’s entitlement to state benefits (Irwin 1995; Dean 1997). (p. 57)
• & Conterminously, the provision of further and higher education for young people expanded. The number of learners in further education increased from 1.7 to 5.4 million between 1980 and 2000 (White 2007; Smithers and Robinson 2000; Hyland and Merrill 2003). The more recent expansion of higher education gathered momentum in the 1990s (Daniel 1993; Dearing 1997; Archer et al. 2003). Over the course of the 1990’s, the number of young people undertaking undergraduate and postgraduate education nearly doubled with a rise in the Age Participation Index from 19% to 35% (White 2007). (p. 57)
• & The Education Reform Act 1988 is often regarded as the most important single piece of post-war education legislation. This legislation led to rapid changes in the curriculum, organisation, management and financing of schools (Spence 1993). An important change for pupils was the introduction of the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) (Department of Education 1985; Mobley et al. 1986; North 1987). This was a radical change. A new grading scheme was established and nearly all school pupils were entered for this new common set of examinations. There were also changes in the nature and format of examinations and assessment by coursework was introduced (Ashford, Gray and Tranmer 1993). (p. 58)
• & In addition to the changes in academic education, a new apprenticeship initiative called ‘Modern Apprenticeships’ was established in order to enhance the technical and vocational skills of young workers (Saunders et al. 1997; Ainley and Rainbird 1999). Young people were now eligible for new, nationally recognised, vocational qualifications (Smithers 1999). These opportunities had the potential to influence the decisions that (p. 58)
• & young people made as they approached the end of compulsory education, although they were not exclusively targeted at minimum age school leavers. (p. 59)
• & In 1997 New Labour came to power with a distinctive education policy agenda, driven by a wider interest in tackling social exclusion. Williamson (2005) comments that it is virtually impossible to present a full catalogue of the measures that were established by the administration to address the challenge of social exclusion. Hodgson and Spours (1999) argue that New Labour’s education and training policies were largely dominated by responses to the Conservative legacy, and highlight a difference of approach towards compulsory and post-compulsory education. New Labour prioritised changes in compulsory education whereas changes in post-compulsory education were positioned lower in the policy hierarchy, due to the more complex interrelationship between post-compulsory education, training and the labour market. Nevertheless, Smithers (2001) notes that what is remarkable about all the apparent changes brought in by New Labour is how little they differed at root from the educational policies of the preceding Conservative administration. (p. 59)
• & Under the New Labour administration minimum age school leavers continued to be excluded from the unemployment benefits available to older workers (CPAG 1998; Mizen 2004). However, a notable example of an early New Labour policy initiative in the area of training was the New Deal for Young People (NDYP). Introduced in 1998, the NDYP aimed to provid (p. 59)
• & opportunities to work, gain new skills, and get work experience for 18-24 year olds (Wilkinson 2003). Participation was mandatory for young people claiming unemployment benefits (i.e. Jobseekers Allowance) continuously for six months (IER 1999). The NDYP resonated within the wider ‘welfare to work’ agenda (Riley and Young 2001; Brewer et al. 2002; Fraser 2004). (p. 60)
• & In the same period New Labour also introduced the minimum wage. The Low Pay Commission was established as a result of the national minimum wage legislation in 1998, and from 1st April 1999 workers aged 1821 were entitled to a minimum wage at the development rate (i.e. a lower level than the adult rate). This legislation was introduced explicitly to target poverty and social exclusion. More recently low pay legislation has been extended to include workers aged 16 and 17. There is a consensus within the sociological literature that the decline in the youth labour market and traditional employment and training opportunities radically altered the landscape against which British young people grew up. These changes are important to understanding the youth experience in the 1980s; however it is conceivable that the experiences of young people a decade later were more influenced by changes in the educational environment and related educational and training policies. Similarly, although perhaps to a lesser extent, young people’s experience may be affected by relatively more buoyant employment conditions. Therefore, more detailed empirical exploration of growing up in Britain in the 1990s should enable an (p. 60)
• & exploration of the effects of the newer, non-traditional markers such as the modern labour market, suggested by Beck as replacement structures to the arguably weakened effects of traditional institutions such as class. When looking at the UK, it is advantageous to compare and contrast this with that of an international perspective. One such text is Blossfeld et al ( 2005) which details the positions of youth transitions in 14 countries in light of globalization. Here, the British labour market is characterised as one where youth/ low skilled employment can be dominated by temporary contracts and job insecurity. This is supported by the contemporary findings of MacDonald (2009), on ‘precarious work’. Bradley (2005) has also compiled a text of cross-national studies which similarly frames the UK experience as unstable. This further highlights and reinforces the representation as in flux. (p. 61)
• & Concomitantly, Breen (1995) stresses the ‘temporal dimension of social class’: that is, that the ‘relative sizes of social classes can change over time which is described as structural change; simultaneously ‘the nature of classes themselves can change over time’ (whether a certain occupation, such as clerk, is comparable in 1920 to the same occupation in 2000); as so ‘the consequences and corollaries of class membership can also shift over time’ (p. 61)
• & (Breen & Rottman 1995 : 98-99). So, the constructed nature of the concepts of stratification and class require careful consideration, and may benefit from a dynamic methodology which takes account of a constantly shifting context. (p. 62)
• & To classify occupations in the BHPS, individuals are usually allocated one of the 370 SOCs (‘Standard Occupational Classification 1990 units’ see ONS, 1990) and these are, in turn, sorted into schemes rather than separate occupations. Data on the jobs of more recent BHPS respondents are also coded to SOC 2000 (ONS, 2000) (p. 64)
• & The BHPS offers a potential resource for studying the lives of young people growing up in Britain in the 1990s (Gayle 2005). (p. 74)
• & The British Youth Panel (BYP), as mentioned above, is a further asset to youth research nested in the BHPS. A youth survey which began in 1994 (p. 77)
• & (Wave 4 of the BHPS), BYP interviews take place with 11 to 15 year olds, termed the ‘Rising 11’s’ due to the standard rotating nature of the panel (see figure 3.1) and their ‘ageing’ into the survey upon turning 11. Available data includes topics such as aspirations, feelings about school and family, and basic household characteristics. Crucially, as respondents move into the adult survey analysis of their responses in the BYP can be linked to their subsequent responses as adults in the BHPS. Also considering the full range of household information, possible analyses include the impacts of both home context and of specific relationships, whether with parents, siblings, or other household members; this is forefront in this research. (p. 78)
• & Aside from this opportunity, the online documentation reasons that the BYP is valuable when researching young people as, ‘the transitional nature of adolescence’ makes a youth panel a rare reserve of information about each cohort. The BYP is an on-going panel with an ‘increasing pool of transitions which can be studied as new 11-year olds are added and as the cohorts move upwards one year. Every year the number of wave-on-wave and longer transitions increases’ (Taylor, Brice, Buck, & Prentice-Lane 2009: 150). (p. 79)
• & Arranged using several record types, the BHPS is designed to be matched using the aforementioned personal identification number (PID). The diagram below illustrates the composition of the survey records’ contents structured above. (p. 81)
• & Table 3.1 taken from (Lambert 2006) gives a thorough précis of the records’ contents structured above (p. 82)
• & Aside from the individual records, there are 178 variables on the household and information is collected on every member of those living under the same roof. Whether or not an individual is present at the interview stage, or old enough to participate, they will still be ‘enumerated’, and therefore acknowledged as potential respondents for follow up in the study. There are core questions on household composition, housing conditions, residential mobility, education and training, health and the usage of health services, labour market behaviour, socio-economic values, income from employment, and benefits and pensions. (p. 83)
• & The large sample size is also an advantage alongside the large amount of data (household & individual) and the high data quality collected via interview rather than questionnaires. Where the BHPS has the edge is undoubtedly its panel element which opens possibilities for tracking people and matching them across time. The ability to create files with an individual’s information at more than one point in time allows investigation around processes and transitions (Rose, Buck, & Corti 1991). Moreover, the panel element of the dataset can be used in a ‘long’ format (explained in later sections) to build comprehensive statistical models for individual or household outcomes. (p. 85)
• & The present focus is on Rising 16’s in the BHPS. These are young people in BHPS households who have ‘aged’ into the scope of the adult survey (illustrated below). (p. 87)
• & BHPS Wave (p. 87)
• & As discussed earlier, Rising 16’s refer specifically to those young adults, answering their first (and subsequent) full adult interview, who have also been enumerated (or given a youth interview) as members of BHPS households prior to their entry into the BHPS main adult sample. This is complicated at times, for example, in Wave A, we are interested in all who are 16. Waves B-D focus centres on those who will have usually been enumerated as household members in the survey although they are not yet eligible (due to their age) for the adult interview (not yet involved in the BYP but enumerated in order to take part in the adult survey upon turning 16). From Wave D onwards, Rising 16’s will be previously enumerated and will normally have participated in the youth panel (BYP) from which they will age into the adult panel. (p. 88)
• & Accordingly, our analyses are limited to those BHPS respondents from the Rising 16 cohort which, in practical terms, means that the analysis is limited to BHPS ‘Original Sample Members’ and to members of the original BHPS (‘Essex’) sample (for sample design terminologies, see Taylor et al., 2009). (p. 88)
• & One aim of the research is to construct ‘synthetic cohorts’ of young people from BHPS households as they come to the end of compulsory education and either continue in education or move into the world of employment and other activities. Table 3.2 shows the ‘synthetic cohorts’ constructed for use in some later analyses. These are the Rising 16’s split into school year in order to do some educational outcome comparisons with the YCS, shown in later chapters. The table displays the number of Rising 16’s who started in each year and the following percentage that remained present in the survey each wave thereafter. This highlights that even after 17 waves, over 50% of the 1991 school leavers are still in the survey. In relation to other studies, such as the YCS which has comparable attrition after only 3 sweeps of data, this is extremely favourable. (p. 89)
• & From the outset it is clear that the ‘synthetic cohorts’ have relatively small sample sizes. Between Wave A (1991) and Wave P (2006) 1,870 young people living in England and Wales grew up into the scope of the adult survey from Original (Essex) sample households. This represents about 120 young people each school year (p. 91)
• & 1991 A 16 97 21% 67% (p. 91)
• & The cohorts were constructed by splitting the BHPS Waves (years of interview) into school years depending on whether a young person is born before or after the September watershed (the cut-off point for the forming of school classes by birth date in England and Wales). In this respect, individuals were either in group A (those with the same school year as their (p. 91)
• & Rising 16 wave) or group B (those who are younger and have their school leaving year one year after they enter the survey). These synthetic cohorts can then be used for the motivation of exploring whether or not data from the BHPS can be used to sensibly study aspects of growing up in Britain in the 1990s. Table 3.7 is an example of the main activities of a portion of these young people. (p. 92)
• & As stated, the design of the BHPS will allow us to link household level information with data on the young person, for example, housing tenure, number of people of working age in the household and, how many rooms the dwelling has. (p. 92)
• & The structure of the BHPS also facilitates linking information from parents, as previously discussed. (p. 92)
• & Further to this, the BHPS features some extra information about parents even if they have not answered directly themselves (i.e. if they were never interviewed as coresident to the youths), that is to say, information the young people have given in their own interviews about their parents (this is especially apparent in the first Wave). Therefore, there is the possibility of imputing those who had retrospective ‘parental data’ (i.e. data on parents, given by children) in order to, potentially, reduce the missing data. (p. 92)
• & In detail, renaming the xwavedat measures by prefixing with an x avoids risk of duplication of names with the master file. The generic mothers’ and fathers’ data can also be prefixed to avoid duplication and all three temp files saved separately. These can be individually merged on the Rising 16’s personal indicator, allowing comparison. The variables are then available in three categories. The xwavedat data prefixed with x (e.g xmasoc; xpaju; xpasemp; xpaboss; xpamngr; xmasoc; xmasemp; xmaboss; xmamngr and so on). The y prefixed measures from the individual files and the manufactured measure isoc which gets more valid cases because it is an aggregate over any year of the BHPS in which the mother was co-resident and was working, whereas mumsoc uses only those co-resident when the ‘Rising 16’ was age 16. Either option is justifiable. (p. 93)
• & Figure 3.4 Potential Data BHPS Data Sources (p. 94)
• & We construct synthetic school year cohorts from the Rising 16’s data. This is because waves of the BHPS generally contain two groups of Rising 16’s: an older group of 16 year olds who have reached the minimum school leaving age, have completed Year 11 and have usually already sat GCSE exams; and a younger group of 16 year olds who also enter the BHPS adult survey but who have not reached minimum school leaving age at the time of interview, and have not usually sat GCSE exams. Therefore we have constructed ‘synthetic cohorts’ of school years which are directly comparable to cohorts of Year 11 pupils in the YCS. (p. 100)
• & The sample sizes of the ‘synthetic’ cohorts of Rising 16’s are reported in Appendix 2. Retention rates within the adult survey are promising, for example 51% of the Rising 16’s, who had completed compulsory schooling, surveyed in 1991, also gave a full interview in 2007 (Wave Q) (see Table 3.2). (p. 101)
• & Table 3.6 BHPS Synthetic Cohorts: Young Person’s Main Activity (%) (p. 104)
• & The first section examines GCSE attainment, the qualifications taken at age 16 when a young person remains in compulsory schooling; the second section explores attainment and main current status (main activity) at 18, two years after finishing compulsory schooling. In the first section the Rising 16’s data is explored further in terms of the analysis of social background influences. (p. 107)
• & Figure 4.1 (p. 110)
• & the proportion continuing education was around 10%, but this had risen to over 50% for the 1970 BCS birth cohort when they were measured in 1986 (Cheung & Egerton 2007: 205) (p. 121)
• & Multinomial Logistic Regression: Labour Force Status at 18 (3 categories) (p. 125)
• & BHPS Rising 16’s Essex Sample, England and Wales, 1991-1999 (n=1083); (p. 350)