Thinking about the Future: Young People in Low-Income Families

This paper examines the orientations to the future of young people living in low-income families in the U.K. and Portugal following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the contexts in which they are socially reproduced. It is based on data from comparative research on families and food poverty, funded by the European Research Council. The study focused on parents and young people aged 11–16 living in low-income families in three European countries (the U.K., Portugal and Norway); only the U.K. and Portuguese data were analysed here. Given the study was concerned with the consequences of low income for food insecurity, we primarily sought to understand how young people manage in the present; however, the project also affords a theoretical and methodological opportunity to explore young people’s thoughts about the future as they begin to transition to adulthood. We found that, when asked about the future, young people responded in different ways: some said they did not think about the future; others mentioned their dreams, but considered them unrealisable. while others expressed hopes that were more concrete and achievable. Precarity constrained the control that young people and their families exercised over their lives. We argue that young people’s aspirations and time horizons are framed in relation to the present and the temporalities of the life course, the public discourses to which they are subjected and the limited access of their families to resources provided by the labour market and the state

Life Story Research: Some reflections on narrative

Spontaneous narratives I want to begin with a few observations about how I came to be more aware of the form in people respond to our questions as empirical qualitative researchers. I did not start out as many researchers do today to seek personal narratives, testimonies and memories. Such research aims have since come to the fore in a climate of emancipatory politics. My early interest in narrative or story telling was sparked by people telling me stories spontaneously about their lives, in the course of semi-structured interviews. Let me give you an example. In the very early 1980s I was doing a great deal of fieldwork for a large study based on a community sample of working class mothers in a particular area of London. It aimed to explain the social origins of depression and involved in depth interviews. As part of what was a four hour interview we were required to begin the interview with a lengthy psychiatric research instrument (the Present State Examination or PSE) in which the interviewees were asked if, when, and over which particular periods and how often they had experienced a vast range of imaginable and unimaginable psychiatric symptoms. Although the study was about the aetiology of psychiatric illness the methods had no interest in women's own understandings of their conditions. The interviews were never fully transcribed and women's stories were lost. What struck me and has stayed with me some thirty years on was how decontextualised, unaskable questions in some cases provoked stories about people's lives and did indeed provide insight into mental illness. 2 Sadly I have forgotten much of the detail of the women's stories. In one case my memory was overlaid by the shock I experienced at my first interview using the PSE when I asked what seemed to me then an unaskable question 'Do you ever feel like you are falling off the edge of the universe ?' This question provoked a young mother to describe her feelings and give a story about her life at that time. My memory of that story was wiped out. What remained was the concern I felt at the time about her small child who was busy destroying the sound system in the sitting room, an activity which his mother, so engrossed was she in telling her story was only occasionally distracted by. Another interview figures in my memory of a mother who described her anxiety symptoms as being brought on by her job as a cleaner for London Underground; she vividly recalled what it was like to go into the tunnels in the early hours when the tube system had closed down and to clean out the rubbish among the rats and in the darkness. Another mother talked about her fear of heights and confined space and how that meant she was unable to attend her interviews at the welfare benefit office which was on the top floor of a local tower block. Her fear of heights also made her very fearful for her children's safety in public places and so inhibited their freedom. These and many other stories emerged often early on in what were often very long interviews and in response to quite specific questions. Since then I have also wondered whether my way of selling the study to the women was important in shaping their responses. Contrary to instructions of the Director of the project I used to tell women that we wanted to hear what it was like to live through the early 1980s -Thatcher's Britain. I also began to notice that not only did people decide when and how in the interviews they chose to tell their stories, they might also choose the timing of the interview itself. One instance stands out very clearly in my mind. After a number of phone calls about setting a date convenient for the interviewee, a time and day were arranged. The interviewee greeted me accordingly on the agreed date as if suggesting this was now a propitious moment to be interviewed. I cannot recall 3 the order in which she gave these explanations but it went something like this, 'I have bought a dog, dyed my hair and got rid of my husband'. Clearly the readiness of this woman to take part in the study at this particular time was prompted by a life course transition. When I moved to a new study interviewing women with a more varied social class profile, I encountered such experiences less often. But I began to realise how unpredictable storytelling was. The conditions of spontaneous narrative As those analysing qualitative research and narrative form emphasise the interview is a collaborative venture. What Martine Burgos (1988 and unpublished) terms 'the inaugural request' by the interviewer to tell a life story not only beckons the interviewee into the narrative mode it also legitimates it. As noted in my early research career when I was doing conventional semi structured interviews I noticed that there were occasions when people broke the rules of the 'question and answer' format of the qualitative interview. Somewhat contrary to Denzin (1997) who suggested that as interpretive researchers we seek out the stories people tell one another 'as they attempt to make sense of the epiphanies or existential turning point moment in their lives (p92), I seemed to happen upon them. Story telling was prefaced by the interviewee deciding to adopt the narrative turn. Burgos notes the obverse of my experience, namely that when she sought to elicit a life story explicitly from her informants only a few of them took up the challenge. Her informants did not necessarily produce narratives defined in terms of a unifying or coherent story though they answered her questions. This does not mean, as she says, that these people lacked narrative competence. Burgos goes on to enunciate what the literature has deemed some of the markers that go with speaking in a narrative voice; their storied structure; the use of 'direct quotation of speech as if the characters of the past presented themselves on 4 a stage; 'the production of closed significant anecdotes… considered as linguistic and narrative marks of the process of fictionalisation'. Other markers include the dramatic character of the performance that is conducted for an audience with attention to aesthetics and emotions (Denzin 1997 96). As the literature on narrative suggests, narrators do not discover the rules of narrative for themselves but follow some kind of model suited to their aims, albeit they are rarely likely to be aware of the narrative frames they are using. From Martine Burgos' point of view the provocation to engage with telling a life story with all the markers of a narrative is the experience of rupture or turning point. As she wrote and talked about in the 1980s, following Paul Ricoeur (1985), the narrator seeks to make a coherent entity out of heterogeneous and often conflicting ideological positions, experiences, feelings, and events which create some kind of disjunction in the life. In that sense the narrator is seeking to 'transcend' the rupture and to make sense of it. Quoting Ricoeur (1985), Burgos says that the event or rupture while doubtless real has to be interpreted in terms of the relational self -the self in relation to others. Burgos' theory made a great deal of sense to me in my experience of spontaneous narratives. But how does this square with the view that all interviews are collaborative endeavours? Rather I concur with Burgos that in such cases the interviewer while acting as the initiator also acts as a social medium or catalyst, that is given two conditions; first, that the interviewee has agreed that her life is of interest for a potential audience; and second, that the interviewer has given the interviewee some autonomy to 'impose their own problematic or way of viewing the world.' While we should be self analytical in interpreting data, we should not lose sight of the conditions in which interviews create them. Responding to the narrative invitation In asking people to talk freely about their lives, I have found a variety of ways in which people respond. Autobiographies of migrants are often those that position 5 selves as heroes in their own stories; some recounted success stories having struggled against the odds. Such narratives constitute resources which set up a moral worldview and warrant the person's positions in it. They are therefore normative. Our study of 'Fatherhood across three generations in Polish, Irish and white British families,' suggests a variety of ways of engaging with the narrative mode. Connor's story is an emblematic heroic story about surviving an unhappy Irish childhood. He uses the emplotment of time to tell a dramatic story. He sets the scene for a number of denouements; the story begins with a series of misfortunes which he seeks from a current vantage point to minimise and to put behind him. His trajectory takes a new turn after his second migration to the UK. He grasps the opportunity with both hands and acts upon it. 'And the dad (his dad) went to America and then came back from America … -he was a plasterer. And then uh, what happened, they must have had me then like you know, cos I was the seventh son. … I'm the last of them by the way. But anyway, father and mother died when I was only 2, 2 and a half -there's about 10 months between the two of them. And the mother said like you know 'I won't be dead a year, and he'll be behind me' like you know. Which he was. .. Well anyway that was how, the way (pause) I didn't know them like you know what I mean, so I don't (pause) in fairness to everybody else like -I didn't miss my mum and dad because I didn't know them. So how can you miss your mum and dad, you know. .. After the father and mother died they took me away and put me into a hospital because they had to examine me and all that so that I hadn't got the TB, you know tuberculosis… It was rampant in those years, the 1930s, in the '30s you know -it was rampant it was. There were so many dying of TB them years you know. Anyway I didn't have it. But you know when you're a baby everybody likes to pick you up, don't they? …Well I'm getting to the story, but everybody likes to pick you up. Well I 6 didn't know this till years and years and years after -that what happened to me was (pause) one of the nurses picked me up and let me fall… Yeah, let me fall and broke my back.' Connor then spends a number of years in hospital and a convalescent home before being sent to an Industrial School run by the Christian Brothers which trained him for a trade once he reached his teens. He stresses he was not subject to any sexual abuse. The 'break' in his life in terms of it taking an upward turn comes when after his second migration to London he is offered the chance to be a foreman for a large building firm. The company car symbolises or stands for the sense of pride and status