Research with young people leaving care has consistently shown the challenges they face, with risk of disadvantage and instability extending into adult lives. Yet not enough is known about positive experiences and pathways,... [ view full abstract ]
Research with young people leaving care has consistently shown the challenges they face, with risk of disadvantage and instability extending into adult lives. Yet not enough is known about positive experiences and pathways, and the things that make a positive difference for young people. This paper draws on work conducted for Against All Odds?, a mixed methods cross-national (England, Denmark and Norway) project funded by the Research Council of Norway (PI: Elisabeth Backe Hansen), which aims to build a more nuanced understanding of positive outcomes for young people leaving the care system, including attending to what "doing well" means to young adults who have experience of living in care.
The Against All Odds? project as a whole combines cross-national policy review, analysis of administrative data, and multi-method qualitative longitudinal interviews with young people and adults (aged 16-30 years) with care experience and who were (or had recently been) in education, employment or training. The analyses presented here focus on one component of the first wave of qualitative interviewing in Denmark and England; in the second of two interviews (which took place at least a week apart), participants were asked to share a piece of music which has positive associations for them. This approach built on the sensory methodology of Sarah Wilson’s work with young people who are looked after, which highlights the importance of music to her participants, ‘as a source of encouragement, to cheer themselves up and blank out upsetting thoughts, but also to explore complex experiences or feelings’ (Wilson 2013, p6).
Our paper considers the ethical and methodological contribution of the approach, whereby music as a sensory space facilitates the sharing of reflections that were not brought forward in the more ‘conventional’ dialogue of the first interview. By giving participants the space to choose music to bring to the second interview, they gain control and can plan what they share. In the context of a multi-method approach, participants’ discussions of their musical choices reveal how they make sense of complex experiences through childhood and beyond, and complex identities as ‘care leavers’.
Drawing on case examples from Denmark and England, we consider the affordances of music for understanding participants’ sense-making and their understanding of continuities and identities, as they use music to reflect on key relationships, critical moments, and possible selves. In this way, work with music contributes to wider theoretical understandings of care leavers’ transitions into adult worlds, addressing their individual lifeworlds and biographical temporalities, including critical moments in the intersections of past, present and future in their lives. Music as a method allows the researcher to hear different stories, enabling participants to articulate the nuance and complexity of their lives in ways that provide an alternative to what Steedman (2000) has termed ‘enforced narratives’: the ’terrible tales’ told about people whose lives are marginalised and stigmatised. To understand the potential of care systems to contribute to good outcomes for young adults we need to move beyond a problematising lens and engage with the complexity of lived experiences through the care system and in transitions into adult worlds.
References
Steedman, C. (2000) Enforced narratives: stories of another self. In: Cosslett, T., Lury, C. and Summerfield, P. (eds.) Feminism and autobiography: texts, theories, methods. London: Routledge.
Wilson, S. (2013) Young People Creating Belonging: Spaces, Sounds and Sights. Final report to ESRC. University of Stirling. http://dspace.stir.ac.uk/bitstream/1893/12942/1/SightsandSoundsfinalreportweb.pdf
