Preliminary research question:

How do young women who has experienced school leaving manage their identity/identities and practice meaning making in narratives forming linkages between home and education?

The aim of this paper is to explore the intersection of home, school/education, identity- and meaning making. To do so I have seen to narrative methodology and the concept og linkage. Linkage is an analytic tool within the narrative tradition to understand meaning making (Gubrium & Holstein, 2009, p. 55-56). The paper is inspired by one of the informants in our qualitative, longitudinal study. In one of our conversations, she is sharing a story where both her home and her school serve as narrative environments (Gubrium & Holstein, 2009), and by linking experiences from the two arenas she creates a context for meaning making. Intrigued by this narrative I wondered if I would find other narratives in other interviews, linking home and school as a context for making and understanding meaning.

Gubrium & Holstein points to workplaces and occupations as significant narrative environments (2009, p.123-124, 161) as this is an arena where people tend to spend many hours of the day and it is often seen as an identity marker. But just as important, the skills, thoughts, praxis and traditions at a workplace or incorporated in an occupation encloses the worker and contributes to the frame of how the individual form narratives. For young people, education holds the same role as the workplace in several aspects, but education also has its specific traits. Students in upper secondary school have less options within the school system compared to when they start university or work. In their everyday life and narratives in a school setting, young people are bound to roles as students, teachers and peers. For young people not attending school, the school environment expected to be a narrative environment in their everyday stories, will be lacking. The lack of narrative environment might also shape and influence identity and how the storyteller forms narratives.

In a contemporary Norwegian context, the consequences of not completing upper secondary education can make it harder to enter the job market. But even more so, according to Staer (2015), the core challenge for a student experiencing school leaving in a “knowledge and competence society” is more importantly tied to the symbolic value of the individual's ability to master the opportunities surrounded him/her. Thus, the responsibility is placed on the individuals ability and capacity to master challenges in "an ocean of opportunities", in a country where social equality with equal opportunities and rights are prominent (Frønes, 2017, p. 22; Staer, 2015).

A home can also serve as a significant narrative environment and informs the storyteller. Gullestad argues that home plays a notable part in Norwegian culture, a culture she calls particularly home oriented (1989). Gullestad argues that the home serves as a creative expression for values that are important to us (1989, p. 57). Thus, the home both serve as a place to spend time, preform everyday tasks and celebrate special occasions as well as a holding a unique position for symbolic value.

In addition to education and home, identity and meaning making makes up the third part of the intersection I want to explore. In a modern, Norwegian society, choice and reflexivity can be said to largely have replaced tradition and the importance of societal institutions and social background as decisive for the individual's role and identity (Giddens, 1991, p. 81). This change requires the individual to constantly perform identity-management. In line with Gullestad (2001, p. 33) I see identity-management as something we exercise in interaction with others.

The analysis for this paper is based on the interviews conducted with 11 young women, extracted from a greater pool of data collected in the project Young people, education and early school leaving in Telemark (UngSA). The data is collected by using an indirect approach to interviewing (Moshuus & Eide, 2016), within the frame of a longitudinal research design. In 2013 a group of researchers and students interviewed 74 young people with an aim to interview the informants several times over a time span of ten year. The data collection is still ongoing, and over the last nine years project members and students have conducted 219 interviews. Approximately half of the young people was recruited as they attended a course at NAV (The Norwegian social services) designed to enable young people without employment to apply for jobs. The other half was recruited from upper secondary school, and they attended classes in vocational training that experience high rates of school leaving. Over the last nine years there has been conducted 219 interviews in the project. The frequency and number of interviews with the informants at this point in the data collection range from one to six interviews. 25 out of the 74 young people interviewed are women. Out of the 25, 11 of the young women have experienced school leaving. It is the total of 37 interviews conducted with them that form the baseline of my study.

This paper is in its initial phase, and findings are yet to come. Based on what I know from our data set at this point, I expect the findings to provide a greater understanding of the young women’s identity and meaning making in the intersection of two important arenas in a Norwegian context, both in terms of the time spent in these arenas, and their practical and symbolic value: home and education.

Frønes, Ivar (2017). Kompetansesamfunnets utfordringer, I: Mette Bunting & Geir H. Moshuus (red.), Skolesamfunnet. Kompetansekrav og ungdomsfellesskap. Cappelen Damm Akademisk. ISBN 978-82-02-55517-7. Kapitel 1. s. 17 – 32. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernitet og selvidentitet. Dansk utgave. Hans Reitzels Forlag. Gubrium, & Holstein, J. A. (2009). Analyzing narrative reality. SAGE. Gullestad, M. (1989). Kultur og hverdagsliv. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget AS. Gullestad, & Miller, D. (2001). Kitchen-table society : a case study of the family life and friendships of young working-class mothers in urban Norway (p. 369 , pl.). Universitetsforl. Moshuus, G. H. & Eide, K. (2016). The Indirect Approach: How to Discover Context When Studying Mariginal Youth. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, January-December 2016: 1-10. Staer, T. Risk and Marginalization in the Norwegian Welfare Society: a National Cohort Study of Child Welfare Involvement. Child Ind Res 9, 445–470 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-015-9319-1