Young people’s engagement in online research:Challenges and lessons from conducting focus groups with young people online

Online qualitative focus groups are a method which has been increasingly used, especially since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, including in research with young people. Studies have reflected upon the challenges of conducting online qualitative research with young people, often drawing on experiences from the pandemic’s earlier stages [e.g. Smithson et al. 2021; Woodrow et al. 2021]. This article reflects upon the challenges faced, and choices made, when conducting online focus groups with 80 young people aged 14–18 to study their democratic engagement during the later 2021 wave of the pandemic. It highlights specific issues around the method’s effectiveness in engaging young people who face different kinds of marginalisation from democratic processes. While online modes of delivery were positive for engaging some, including groups of geographically dispersed young people, they exacerbated existing inequalities for others: young people from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, from remote or rural areas and those with certain disabilities. Such inequalities in research participation can lead to variation in data quality, and therefore in the types of knowledge produced. Using these insights we outline a range of methodological and research design considerations for researchers when choosing whether to conduct online focus group research with young people.</p

Making votes-at-16 work in Wales: lessons for the future

The 2021 Senedd election was the first election in which young people aged 16 and 17 were enfranchised to vote in Wales. The election came with a range of unique challenges, not the least because of the coronavirus pandemic. Given these challenges, how did young people experience the election and what worked to mobilise 16- and 17-year-olds to vote? Based on large-scale qualitative research with 16- and 17- year-olds across Wales and with stakeholders involved in youth work and youth democratic engagement, this report provides a comprehensive look into how the pioneering generation enfranchised to vote at age 16 in Wales experienced the 2021 Senedd election and analyses what can be learnt for young people’s engagement in future elections and youth political engagement in Wales. The findings highlight that young people in Wales faced a range of barriers to turning out to vote in the 2021 Senedd election – some exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, others that would have materialised regardless of the pandemic. Some young people were better placed than others to overcome these barriers, and experiences of engagement with the election varied considerably among young people from different social groups and different parts of Wales

In vitro cryopreservation of date palm caulogenic meristems

Cryopreservation is the technology of choice not only for plant genetic resource preservation but also for virus eradication and for the efficient management of large-scale micropropagation. In this chapter, we describe three cryopreservation protocols (standard vitrification, droplet vitrification, and encapsulation vitrification) for date palm highly proliferating meristems that are initiated from vitro-cultures using plant growth regulator-free MS medium. The positive impact of sucrose preculture and cold hardening treatments on survival rates is significant. Regeneration rates obtained with standard vitrification, encapsulation-vitrification, and droplet-vitrification protocols can reach 30, 40, and 70%, respectively. All regenerated plants from non-cryopreserved or cryopreserved explants don't show morphological variation by maintaining genetic integrity without adverse effect of cryogenic treatment. Cryopreservation of date palm vitro-cultures enables commercial tissue culture laboratories to move to large-scale propagation from cryopreserved cell lines producing true-to-type plants after clonal field-testing trials. When comparing the cost of cryostorage and in-field conservation of date palm cultivars, tissue cryopreservation is the most cost-effective. Moreover, many of the risks linked to field conservation like erosion due to climatic, edaphic, and phytopathologic constraints are circumvented. (Résumé d'auteur

From Big Society to Shared Society? Geographies of social cohesion and encounter in the UK’s National Citizen Service

This article explores and expands debates on the geographies of social cohesion and encounter, specifically in relation to young people and informal citizenship training. Three questions drive our agenda in this paper. First, how do certain youth spaces get enrolled into wider political discourses, functioning as geographical expressions of government visions to create a political legacy? Second, how are these spaces engineered and operate on-the-ground? Finally, how do young people understand their experiences of such spaces? To address these questions, we use the example of ‘National Citizen Service’ – a youth programme operating in England and Northern Ireland – to raise critical questions about the wider politics of spaces of informal education and attempts by the state to ‘make’ citizens and future neighbours. The article examines the rationale for this growing scheme, targeted at 15–17 year olds and designed to foster a ‘more cohesive, responsible and engaged society’. Drawing on original fieldwork with key architects, stakeholders and young people, we analyse the narratives that underlie NCS and its expansion – specifically around social cohesion and citizenship education. We explore the idea of ‘social mix’ as one of NCS’ guiding principles and its place as part of state narratives about the ‘Big Society’ and ‘Shared Society’

'Wh'-question intonation in Standard Colloquial Bengali: An LFG analysis

In this paper, we examine the intonational phonology of multi-clause constituent (‘wh’-) questions in the dialect of Standard Colloquial Bengali (SCB), spoken in Kolkata, West Bengal (cf. Chatterji 1921, Hayes & Lahiri 1991, Lahiri & Kennard 2020). 1 , 2 We seek to explore the relationships that exist between intonational phonology, pragmatics (viz. information structure), and semantics (viz. interrogative scope), modelling them in the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG).3 Our goal in eliciting data was to identify patterns of intonation used with ‘wh’-questions in SCB for analysis within the non-derivational framework of LFG. In particular, we sought to investigate multiple ‘wh’-questions and multi-clause ‘wh’- questions. We aimed to determine if all ‘regular’ ‘wh’-questions bear the same L* HP LI contour identified in Hayes & Lahiri (1991) regardless of how many ‘wh’-question words appear (single vs. multiple ‘wh’- questions) or how many clauses a ‘wh’-question word may take scope over (single vs. multi-clause ‘wh’- questions). After providing background on intonational phonology and Bengali (Section 2), we outline our methodology (Section 3), and then present our results (Section 4). Discussion and LFG analyses are provided (Section 5) before we supply our conclusions (Section 6)

Becoming citizens in late modernity: a global-national comparison of young people in Japan and the UK

The experiences of young people in developed societies such as Japan and the UK have undergone considerable change in the last 30 or so years. Our starting point is that such developments are associated with the globalization of institutions and an individualization of experience, which destabilizes life-course transitions and cultural transmission between generations. However, we continue to assert the importance of the national framework, defined by national cultures and territorial jurisdictions, in mediating global processes. Adapting Connolly's (2005. Pluralism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press) differentiation between types of politics in late modernity, we argue for a distinction to be made between being citizens and becoming citizens. Being a citizen involves integration into pre-existing collective identities such as nation-states which increasingly act to restrict membership to the citizen community. With this in mind, we compare the key sites of social recognition in Japan and the UK for young people and identify some fundamental barriers to citizenship. In addition, we discuss the ways in which conventional social and educational policy responses aimed at integrating young people into work and nation perpetuate their precarious relationship to citizenship. These processes are contrasted with becoming a citizen, which is dynamic, intimately connected to cultural learning and the creation of new civic virtues and sources of recognition