Session Information
05 SES 06 A, Paths, Participation and Social Mobility
Paper Session
Contribution
The meanings and motivations that young adults attach to their participation in lifelong learning (LLL) policy measures do not always align with the formal policy objectives of policy experts. The ways in which young adults orient to LLL policies and adopt particular ‘styles’ of participation relate to two important dimensions: i) the varying levels of leeway given to participants to adapt policies to their subjective needs and expectations, and ii) young adults’ resources for reflexivity and agency (O’Connor, 2014). LLL policy measures differ significantly in how much adaptation they allow, ranging from considerable flexibility in their design to levels of rigidity that imply normalization of individual life courses. Also, young adults’ abilities to make use of and benefit from formally offered leeway – or to navigate more rigidly organized policies and achieve ‘informal customization’ – vary based on their intrapersonal and social resources, which relate not only to their family background, but also their previous life course progression and life course cumulation. The latter refers to a process in which advantages and disadvantages do not occur randomly during a lifetime, but according to a logic of path dependence that usually starts with early advantages or disadvantages brought about by people’s social origins. (Elder, 2007; Levy & Bühlmann, 2016).
This paper explores the meanings and motivations that young adults attach to their participation in LLL policies and, adopting a comparative lens, aims to identify LLL ‘participation styles’ among young adults in Finland, Scotland, and Spain. These participation styles are examined in relation to young adults’ reflexive and agentic resources, their life plans and future aspirations, their relational skills, and the differing LLL policies. Furthermore, the negotiation and construction of young adults’ life courses and biographies are always embedded in particular contexts that enable different opportunity structures, which this analysis addresses through the views of policy experts.
In Finland, the analysis focuses on a national LLL policy and the ways it is interpreted and realized in the two socio-demographically contrasting functional regions of Kainuu and Southwest Finland. In Scotland, the focus is on one national LLL policy initiative, and its implementation in two functional regions – Glasgow City Region and Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Region. In Spain, the analysis involves one regional LLL policy training measure addressed to low skilled youngsters as it is implemented by a Local Government in the functional region of Girona, in Catalonia. In all these countries and regions, the examined policy measures are funded by the European Social Fund (ESF) and by the state or municipalities. The analysis is based on biographical interviews with young adults and thematic interviews with LLL policy experts. Taken together, comparative analysis of these interview data ‘add[s] to the understanding of individual experience by placing it in context and thus yield[s] knowledge that is of general sociological relevance by demonstrating the interrelatedness of agency and structure’ (Brannen and Nilsen, 2011: 603).
Method
This paper draws on data collected from March to July 2017 as part of the Horizon 2020 project ‘Policies Supporting Young People in their Life Course – A Comparative Perspective of Lifelong Learning and Inclusion in Education and Work in Europe’ (YOUNG_ADULLLT), a comparative study of Lifelong Learning (LLL) policies across nine European countries. The three policy cases from Finland, Scotland and Spain were selected for closer comparison as each makes use of ESF funding to address young adults in vulnerable life situations across socio-demographically contrasting regions. In the regions belonging to the cases (two in Finland and Scotland, one in Spain), biographical interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of LLL policy participants aged 18 to 29 (n=7–9 per region), considering the gender and ethnic diversity of the sample. Interviews probed young people’s life courses prior to the intervention and their interpretation of the interaction between personal trajectories and LLL participation. Drawing on principles of life course research (LCR), biographical interviews allow exploration not only of how social processes and structures had influenced young people’s trajectories, but also how the construction of a personal biography (including external influences on that construction) serves the function of ‘explaining’ a young person’s trajectory to themselves and others (Elder et al., 2003; Rosenthal, 1993; Shanahan et al., 2016). The study also examines the views of policy experts in order to identify formal policy narratives and explore how they relate to young peoples’ participation. To this end, further thematic interviews were conducted with policy experts (n=4–7 per region) with the sample comprising a mix of policy managers and street-level professionals. Data collection was harmonised across the three research teams using a common interview schedule (translated into local languages) and data collection procedures (Rambla et al., 2018). The initial round of analysis was conducted independently by research teams in each country using an agreed set of codes (see Rambla et al., 2018) before international synthesis of the findings. For the purposes of this paper, one researcher representative of each country re-analysed the data in order to identify a typology of ‘participation styles’. While initial treatment of the data by local researchers allowed detailed contextual knowledge to inform analysis, whole team discussion of tentative findings was used to verify inter-subjective validity (Green et al., 2007) and finalise the final themes outlined below.
Expected Outcomes
The findings show that, in all the three countries under examination, young adults participating in LLL policy measures are a heterogeneous group with regard to their LLL policy participation styles. Our results point to different connections between the opportunity structures within which young people draw their life plans and their perception and use of the LLL policies in which they are involved. Young adults’ participation styles relate to the breadth or narrowness of the policies’ understanding of the dimensions on which they aim to intervene. Moreover, as expected, the results obtained in this study highlight the relevance of young people’s resources and previous life course experiences. Generally, those young people who were most motivated and positive about their LLL experiences and who exercised the most autonomy over their participation were those who had greater social and intrapersonal resources and, as a result, were more able to adhere to a formalized and standardized LLL pathway. By contrast, young people with more disrupted life courses and fewer sources of support were more likely to continue with a disrupted trajectory under the LLL policies they participated in, potentially reproducing processes of social exclusion (c.f. Alheit & Dausien, 2002; Kotthoff et al., 2017).
References
Alheit, P. and Dausien, B. (2002). The ‘double face’ of Lifelong Learning: Two Analytical Perspectives on a ‘Silent Revolution. Studies in the Education of Adults, 34(1): 3-22. Brannen, J., & Nilsen, A. (2011). Comparative biographies in case-based cross-national research: methodological considerations. Sociology, 45(4), 603-618. Elder, G. (2007). Life Course Perspective. In G. Ritzer (Ed.) The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (pp. 2634–2639). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Elder, G. H., Johnson, M. K., & Crosnoe, R. (2003). The emergence and development of life course theory. In Handbook of the life course (pp. 3-19). Springer, Boston, MA. Green, J., Willis, K., Hughes, E., Small, R., Welch, N., Gibbs, L., & Daly, J. (2007). Generating best evidence from qualitative research: the role of data analysis. Australian and New Zealand journal of public health, 31(6), 545-550. Kotthoff, H-G., Carillo Gáfaro, J. F., Bittlingmayer, U. H., Boutiuc-Kaiser, A., Parreira do Amaral, M., Rinne, R. (2017). Work Package 3 International Report: LLL Policies and Inclusion in Education and Work. YOUNG_ADULLLT Working Papers. Freiburg, Germany: University of Education Freiburg. Levy, R., & Bühlmann, F. (2016). Towards a socio-structural framework for life course analysis. Advances in Life Course Research, 30, 30–42. O’Connor, C. (2014). Agency and reflexivity in boomtown transitions: young people deciding on a school and work direction. Journal of Education and Work, 27(4), 372–391. Rambla, X., Jacovkis, J., Kovacheva, S. and Walther, A. (2018) Work Package 5: International Qualitative Analysis Report. YOUNG_ADULLLT Working Papers. Barcelona, Spain Autonomous University of Barcelona. Rosenthal, G. (1993). Reconstruction of life stories: Principles of selection in generating stories for narrative biographical interviews. The narrative study of lives, 1(1), 59-91. Shanahan, M. J., Mortimer, J. T., & Johnson, M. K. (2016). Introduction: life course studies–trends, challenges, and future directions. In Handbook of the life course (pp. 1-23). Springer, Cham. YOUNG_ADULLLT (2020) YOUNG_ADULLLT project website. Retrieved from www.young-adulllt.eu [Accessed on 21.01.2022].
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.