Youth research

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Youth research deals - in general terms - with the conditions under which adolescents go through this phase of life, which factors contribute to successful development and which influence the younger generation exerts on society as a whole. Youth research is an interdisciplinary field in which educational science , sociology and psychology are significantly involved. As research in the true sense of the word, it is comparatively young, yet it is one of the major focal points in the humanities and social sciences alongside childhood research. The database of social scientific literature lists more than 5,000 publications on the keyword youth that have been written in German-speaking countries since 1970 . This suggests that there can hardly be any talk of 'the' youth research. Rather, it is a multi-faceted science that is just as interested in identity development as it is in drug use, political attitudes, family relationships or educational behavior. In spite of this diversification, youth research in German-speaking countries was always tied to certain scientists who set significant trends.

Youth as a subject of research

As the term indicates, youth research deals with youth as a phase of life. Behind this supposed uniqueness of an everyday view of what youth is hides an enormous variety of what is scientifically understood by youth. Because the demarcation of when someone is no longer a child and not yet an adult is difficult for youth research. This is not only due to the different disciplines or the large number of empirical studies that cover very different age ranges, but also to the fact that the youth phase itself has historically changed, in particular lengthened. When determining what youth actually is, three basic approaches can be distinguished: grouping according to age, socio-psycho-biological grouping and subjective assessment.

Youth as an age range

The approach to determining youth attempts to determine what youth is based on age limits. The end of youth is then often associated with reaching the maturity indicated at the age of 18 years. From this point onwards, adolescents are considered to have full legal capacity in almost all areas. Only juvenile criminal law grants an age limit of 21 years and over, from which people can reach full criminal responsibility. However, the right to vote , legal capacity, vehicle driver's license and the like are granted to adolescents at the age of 18 and are therefore legally equated with adults.

This legal provision of the end of youth leaves open when childhood ends and the youth phase begins. At most, the age limit of 14 years, from which adolescents are limited criminally responsible, could be used as the lower limit. Adolescent research has for the most part abandoned these age indications and a subdivision into the life phases of early (12-14 years), middle (14-18 years), late (18-21 years) and post- adolescence (19 –25 years), which together make up the youth phase of life. Most empirical studies on the youth phase investigate precisely this age range from 12 to 25 years, with some studies having extended the age limit up to the age of 29. In addition to this age classification, however, there are a number of other boundaries in the literature.

As the individual values ​​show, the identification of youth through age information is not entirely independent of structural and / or biological factors. The lower limit of 12 years is roughly the same period in which puberty begins for today's young people in industrialized nations. The transition from late to post-adolescence at the age of 18 coincides with the fact of legal changes. In this respect, age information always represents a correlate of social or psychological factors of development.

Socio-psycho-biological grouping

The second approach focuses more on youth psychological , social and biological changes. The concept of development tasks by Robert J. Havighurst ( Developmental Tasks and Education , 1948) has proven to be an important concept. In essence, it states that adolescents must have mastered a specifiable catalog of developmental tasks in order to move on to the next phase of life . Young people are only grown up when they have socio-emotionally detached themselves from their parents , have set up their own household and taken up professional activity, have mature relationships with peers and a balanced self-image as well as a stable value system.

The objection to this upper limit is that these status transitions to adult status ( job , starting a family, etc.) have become increasingly temporal and therefore do not occur almost simultaneously. Would a 17-year-old trainee with his own apartment and partner have grown up, a 27-year-old student who still lives with his parents and receives student loans, still a young person?

In this approach, the beginning of the youth phase is fixed with the onset of the maturation of the sexual organs (vulgo: puberty ), which, strictly speaking, has the consequence that the youth phase begins earlier for girls than for boys. In general, however, this lower limit is set and normalized to 12 years, because then both girls and boys are in the process of sexual maturation.

Subjective assessment

One possibility of confronting the problems of the two previous limitations of youth is seen in the subjective self-attribution of adolescents. To put it in a nutshell: a youth is someone who sees himself as a youth. This subjective interpretation of one's own phase of life is understood as a personal assessment of what development tasks have already been successfully mastered and what has not. The advantage of this approach is that it allows the subjective processes of youth development to be focused more closely. It also shows that the self-assessment is related to coping with developmental tasks and completing status passages (job, starting a family, etc.). A clear disadvantage is that this self-assessment of one's own phase of life does not allow a clear definition of the phase of youth and that empirical studies would theoretically also have to ask 40-year-olds who still consider themselves young.

Youth types

A higher-level variant of the demarcation of young people is the access through youth types . Here, young people are referred to as specific subgroups of young people according to relevant characteristics such as youth culture, leisure time orientations or values. Access to the demarcation of young people by youth types can use the three criteria mentioned above and thus represents a superordinate method.

Summary

As a cross-section of all three methods to determine the subject of youth research, it can be drawn that youth is marked by the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood, that this (trivial) limitation can be attached to the mastering of developmental tasks and the subjective assessment Being youthful is not independent of these developmental challenges. The age spectrum examined generally ranges from 12 to 25 years, whereby in the various studies it is important to note which age range is examined. Because: between the ages of 12 and 16, different development-relevant processes occur (e.g. turning to peer groups) than between the ages of 18 and 25 (e.g. building intimate partnerships).

History of youth research

Adolescent research that deals systematically and with the aim of describing and explaining adolescent behavior and attitudes is more recent. It is true that there were already treatises in ancient Greece and Rome on how to educate young people (whereby the term youth included something different from what it is today) and how boorish the growing generation is (such as Socrates ). In the centuries that followed, questions of proper upbringing (especially in the religious field) were frequently discussed. However, the answers given to these questions were less empirical and more normative. The beginnings of the modern view of youth were less "research" in the narrower sense than hermeneutical-philosophical considerations of the youth phase. These include Rousseau's "Emile" as well as Schleiermacher's "Theory of Education" and Humboldt 's theory of education . Despite all the differences, this phase has in common that questions of correct upbringing, the turning to the pupil as a subject with desires and needs and the idea of ​​upbringing for independent activity were developed. Three features of this philosophical view of childhood and adolescence are still part of youth research today - even though the concept of education at that time has now become a broader concept of socialization and is predominant in youth research.

  • Socialization is the interaction between older and younger generations
  • The goal of socialization is to enable the younger generation to be independent
  • Socialization takes place in the area of ​​tension between tradition (of the older generation) and modernization (by the younger generation)

Youth research from 1900

These basic ideas continued to have an effect in the work, which in the narrower sense can be described as youth research and which began at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and originated in Germany. American psychologists such as Granville Stanley Hall (Adolescence, 1904) were significantly inspired by the German philosophy of education, the later (incorrectly uniformly) described as the " youth movement " emancipation from parts of the youth brought with it a large number of educational considerations ( Eduard Spranger , Psychology of Adolescence, 1924) and the first empirical studies on development in adolescence were carried out ( Charlotte Bühler , Das Seelenleben des Teenager, 1921; Martha Muchow , Der Lebensraum des Großstadtkindes, posthumously 1935). With Siegfried Bernfeld a leading member of the Viennese youth movement himself became a protagonist of youth research. Further impulses for youth research came from the burgeoning psychoanalysis and psychology (W. Stern, Grundlinien des juvenile soul life, 1925; Anna Freud , Adolescence, 1958) and experimental pedagogy, which endeavored to develop methodically controlled optimal teaching and learning settings .

The youth research of this time concentrated essentially on the psychological crisis located in the youth phase and its interconnections with social processes as well as questions of cultural development. Although this period cannot be compared with today's youth research in terms of theoretical approaches and empirical designs, it still has an influence on the history of ideas that should not be underestimated.

Youth research from 1950

A veritable empirical fireworks display was kindled in the post-war period. The Shell Youth Studies , which have been carried out since 1953, will initially be an integral part of German-language youth research , initially under the responsibility of EMNID and officially published by the Deutsche Shell Jugendwerk (since 2000 Deutsche Shell) from 1965 onwards. Since the beginning of the 1950s, these studies have brought about a paradigm shift in methodology in youth research. The rather qualitative-hermeneutic approach of the turn of the century and the following is almost completely replaced by quantitative questionnaire studies and is to become the predominant empirical approach until the 1980s. In terms of content, this early youth research in the still young Federal Republic primarily focused on questions of political attitudes and the social integration of young people ( Helmut Schelsky , Die skeptische Generation, 1957; V. Graf Blücher, Die Generation der Unbeflichen, 1966), but also leisure and educational behavior as well as - in approaches - youth cultures (youth work of the German Shell, youth: education and leisure, 1965).

Youth research from 1970

The investigation of social and (protest) political engagements has been on the agenda of youth research since the mid-1970s and has been supplemented by the focus on youth cultures as the key to understanding youth development since the Shell study of 1981 . This Shell study also introduces a methodological reorientation of youth research. The qualitative (biographically and ethnographically shaped) youth research that has flared up since the mid-1970s is given a prominent place in this 9th Shell Youth Study and is likely to have contributed significantly to the renaissance of qualitative youth research. In terms of content, too, the 1981 Shell study has several twists and turns. From now on, youth cultures are no longer primarily understood as countercultures to adult society, but as a form of expression that makes it easier for young people to cope with their everyday problems and to work on their own identity. The 1981 study then initiated a veritable boom in research into youth cultures and youthful lifestyles, the result of which was, among other things, the assumption of an individualized and de-homogenized youth.

Youth research in the 1990s

Triggered by the reunification , youth research slid into a real boom in the 1990s. Research on the effects of social change on youth development is on the agenda and, alongside right-wing extremism and violence, is becoming a hot topic in youth research. The comparison of the growing up of young people from East and West Germany is seen as a "natural experiment " to investigate the connection between society and development. In addition to this reorientation in terms of content and the stronger influence of psychology on youth research, which has hitherto been strongly sociologically influenced, a new study design is also finding its way into youth research. A number of longitudinal studies will be carried out and will enable insights into intra-individual development processes in the youth phase on a broader basis than before.

What remained in public memory, however, are rather east-west comparisons of German adolescents, which, however, produced hardly satisfactory and in some cases non-replicable findings and which were exposed to strong criticism towards the end of the 1990s. Overall, this decade can be seen as a door opener for broad-based youth research, which is methodologically increasingly dualized (qualitative and quantitative research), has made longitudinal studies a matter of course as an important tool of knowledge and has increasingly based theoretically on psychological and sociological concepts.

Current trends in youth research

At the turn of the millennium, youth research also changed fundamentally (albeit slowly) and is still in this process of change. International comparisons of education such as the TIMSS study of 1997 have shifted the focus to empirical educational research, in which pedagogical psychology and subject didactics in particular are increasingly hooked. This change in content was implemented at the latest in the course of the PISA debates and has enabled educational research to flourish that already existed in the 1970s, but currently seems to have better chances of being implemented in the long term due to the significantly stronger empirical orientation .

Summary

All in all, the history of youth research has always been a history of socio-political discourse booms and it seems to be topical. Youth research, its theories, methods and questions are therefore probably understandable, especially against the background of social processes. This connection, so a quintessence, has its origin in the fact that the older generation always has an interest in gaining certainty about the position of the younger generation on the way to independent activity and assuming social responsibility.

Disciplines involved in youth research

Since its (empirical) beginnings, youth research has been a multidisciplinary field in which educational science, psychology and sociology play a major role, but political science and ethnology also make a contribution. Since the mid-1980s, the idea of ​​speaking of youth research as a socialization research that incorporates the advantages and knowledge gained from all the disciplines involved has been established. The extent to which this interdisciplinarity is actually implemented is sometimes viewed critically. On the other hand, there is consensus on the special contribution that the three main disciplines can make to research on young people.

pedagogy

The main interest of educational research on young people is the conditions under which young people are enabled to be self-employed. That means: which educational measures and educational interventions are helpful so that young people can act independently as adults in the society around them. While educational science still dominated the discourse on and research into youth at the beginning of the 20th century through theoretical concepts, the focus is now more on the praxeological and practical area. Social and special education as well as related areas have successively developed concepts of how young people can be enabled or re-established. In addition, educational science, borrowing mainly sociological concepts and enriching them through subject orientation, has contributed to describing youthful development and its manifestations (youth cultures, lifestyles) as individually functional and thus diverted the focus away from youthful deviance as problematic behavior that disrupts society.

sociology

The sociology of youth is largely concerned with the relationship between youth and society, and this in both directions. The main questions are how social conditions affect young people growing up and how young people as a generation influence social developments. Topics such as political attitudes, youth cultures and media use are addressed as well as the role that families and peers play in the process of socializing young people. In the 1980s and 1990s, sociology focused increasingly on how changed social structures (dissolution of social milieus) affect individual biographies. From this discourse, the formula of the de-structured and individualized youth phase emerged, which however did not go unchallenged.

Psychology and psychoanalysis

From psychology , it is above all developmental psychology that has dealt with the youth phase. The focus was and is on the question of how adolescents cope with development tasks and under what conditions a functional progression to adulthood can be expected. In addition, the theory of adolescent crisis , which is well-founded in Freud's work and developed by Erik Erikson , has had a decisive influence on youth research. Psychological youth research has shown in particular the need for a longitudinal consideration of youth development and has produced concepts of development as action in context. As a result, the view that young people not only react to societal and social conditions but also actively create environments for themselves in order to promote their development has become prominent in youth research.

proof

  1. ↑ cf. Siegfried Bernfeld "An Institute for Psychology and Sociology of Youth" (1920) in ders., Anti-Authoritarian Education and Psychoanalysis , Volume 3, March Verlag 1970, pp. 802-836 and ders. (Ed.), From Community Life of Youth, Contributions for youth research , international psychoanalyt. Publisher 1922

See also

further reading

Books

  • Hartmut Griese: Current youth research and classic youth theories. A module for educational and social science courses. Berlin: LIT 2007 ISBN

978-3-8258-0922-5

  • Klaus Hurrelmann, Gudrun Quenzel: Life phase youth. An introduction to youth research in the social sciences. 12th edition Weinheim / Munich: Juventa Verlag 2012. ISBN 978-3-7799-2600-9
  • Ludwig Stecher, Angela Ittel, Hans Merkens (Hrsg.): Yearbook youth research. 1st edition 2012. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag 2012 ISBN 978-3-531-19716-6
  • Heinz-Hermann Krüger, Cathleen Grunert (Hrsg.): Handbook Childhood and Youth Research. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag 2010. ISBN 978-3-531-15838-9
  • Heinz Reinders: Youth types between education and leisure. Münster: Waxmann 2006. ISBN 978-3-8309-1724-3
  • Christine Riegel, Albert Scherr, Barbara Stauber (eds.): Transdisciplinary youth research. Basics and research concepts. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag 2010. ISBN 978-3-531-17132-6
  • Dirk Villányi, Matthias D. Witte, Uwe Sander (eds.): Global youth and youth cultures. Growing up in the age of globalization. Weinheim / Munich: Juventa Verlag 2007. ISBN 978-3-7799-1746-5

Magazines and yearbooks

  • Discourse on childhood and youth research
  • Historical youth research: Yearbook of the archive of the German youth movement
  • Yearbook youth research (see Ittel et al. 2010)
  • Journal of Youth Studies

Web links