Funding: Ministry of Education and Research
Project period: 2020–2024
Researchers: Monika Grønli Rosten (project manager), Monica Five Aarset
In this project, we aim to explore multicultural and socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods as a distinctive context for parents and children’s negotiations around risk and self-determination. Previous research often highlights family, kinship, and transnational relationships as relevant contexts for such negotiation in the transition from young to adult.
In the previous project period, we explored the phenomenon of «negative social control» based on young people’s experiences with control from their family on the one hand and social control in youth environments on the other. In this study, we will specifically include the neighbourhood as a significant context for restrictions on young people’s self-determination.
In urban areas where ethnic divides, social problems, and neighbourhood stigma have consequences for social interaction, the mechanisms for social control are shifted and also changed. Internally in such neighbourhoods, concerns about living conditions, juvenile delinquency, and inadequate integration characterize the everyday lives of young people, parents, and public helpers.
Previous research has shown that minority parents often worry in different ways about boys and girls, for instance that sons may do drugs and get involved in criminal activities and that daughters may break chastity norms and be exposed to social control and spreading rumours outside the home.
The majority society’s concern is also often directed at the minority girls in the private sphere, as part of a potentially problematic family context, and at the minority boys in the public, as part of youth environments with specific challenges. In this project, the goal is to see different forms of perceived risk and [A1] social control as related phenomena that are otherwise often explored separately, in different research fields.
We ask:
• What kinds of gender patterns are associated with the experience of risk, participation, and social control for young people in vulnerable neighbourhoods?
• How does the negotiation of young people’s self-determination take place across generations, ethnic boundaries, and other important social divides?
Data material will consist of:
1) Qualitative interviews in small groups or individually with young people and parents in two selected neighbourhoods.
2) Participatory observation in social arenas for young people and parents in the same neighbourhoods
For more information, contact Monika Grønli Rosten, e-mail: monika.rosten@oslomet.no