Subjective understandings of young people's agency: concepts, methods and lay frames of reference

How young people experience, perceive and orient to the contexts in which they are growing up are questions which animate youth research. A widely shared analysis suggests that young people’s subjective experiences, attributions of meaning and orientations are more individualised as a result of socio-economic changes and dominant cultural and political discourses. Accordingly, there has emerged a conceptually puzzling disconnect between objective circumstances of constraint, tightening inequalities and highly unequal life chances on the one hand and subjective outlooks on the other. Researchers show that young people foreground agency and merit based causes of success in their own lives whilst having some critical awareness of wider structural constraint. Such views are seen to sit in tension with one another and to reflect wider contradictions in the flawed promise of meritocratic success in class societies. With reference to empirical evidence from the UK the chapter develops an argument that lay ambivalence and conflicted understanding are overstated. Widening the analytic perspective on lay frames of reference reveals ways in which people construe individual agency and structural process as sides of the same coin, at least when it comes to navigating their own lives and supporting close others.