Catching on, wising up and learning from your mistakes: Young people's accounts of moral development

This article examines young people's accounts of their own and others' moral development in Great Britain. The young people understood moral development as a process of moving from the position of a dependent moral learner to an independent moral agent. This process was seen as age related, embodied, and experiential. Through a process of experimentation, of trial and error in recognising and enacting right and wrong which is met with punishment or reward as appropriate, the young person comes to recognise boundaries first set by an authority. The locus of authority moves from being external, where the dependent moral learner trusts in the authority of a teacher, to internal, where trust is in the authority of the self. Crucial elements in this process are trust and reciprocity. As the child moves from dependence on the teacher to dependence on the self, those who wish to have the authority to set moral boundaries must earn respect, and as they wish to be trusted, they must trust in young people. The ubiquitous developmental model of moral development sees the child as in process towards the end of adult moral standing. It is based on an adult subject position, and so when drawn on by young people in their own moral discourse, provides them with no subject position. As a result they find it easier to talk about moral development through descriptions of the behaviour of younger siblings, or themselves when younger, taking the adult subject position

Researching Childhood: Time, memory and Method

About the book: This collection of essays represents some of the most important recent research into changing patterns of family, household and community life. As well examining the experiences of childhood and parenting, it analyses the changing circumstances of young people as they develop their own family and household trajectories, ones which are markedly different to those typically followed by their parents. In addition, the book includes chapters concerned with adaption to other types of change in domestic and community living, including relocation and retirement. Bringing together some of the leading sociologists in the field to explore how these informal social relationships change over time and the life course, it will be essential reading on courses concerned with the family and youth sociology

Critical moments: choice, chance and opportunity in young people's narratives of transition

The 'Inventing Adulthoods' study seeks to document transitions to adulthood reported by over 100 young people living in five contrasting communituies in the UK over a five year period. A principal aim of the study is to identify 'critical moments' in young people's biographies and to explore how these moments are implicated in processes of social inclusion and exclusion. This article reports on an analysis of the first of three rounds of one-to-one interviews. We begin by mapping young people's critical moments, exploring the relationship between the social and geographical location in which they live and the kinds of events that they report as having particualr biographical significance. We suggest that the character of these critical moments is socially structured, as are young people's responses to them. The argument is illustrated by case studies that show the interaction of choice, cahnce and opportunity in three young people's lives

Thanks for the memory: Memory books as a methodological resource in biographical research

The article describes the evolution of the ‘memory book’, an innovative method for biographical research. In the first part of the article, we explain the origins of the method, tracing our own journey from conducting memory work as a research group to the creation of memory books as a method to be used alongside interviews in a longitudinal qualitative study of young people’s transitions to adulthood. In the second part of the article, we map the form and content of memory books generated in the study, commenting on issues of audience and privacy. In the final part of the article, we discuss how we used the memory book data, distinguishing between their function as sources of documentation, resources for elaboration and critical tools for the understanding of identity. The article draws attention to the potential for the method to bring embodiment and the visual dimensions into a method dominated by text and discourse, as well as facilitating the expression of a range of ‘voices’ and time frames which complicate cohesive narrative presentations of self