@article{f0a7977967b443ceb473518652bea9e5,
title = "The COVID-19 pandemic and youth in recent, historical perspective: more pressure, more precarity",
abstract = "Young people have faced some of the hardest social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns. Taking a critical Youth Studies perspective, we draw on research with nearly 1000 16-to-30-year olds in North East England in order to rectify the {\textquoteleft}structured absence{\textquoteright} of young people{\textquoteright}s viewpoints in national media and political commentary about the pandemic. Our findings contradict narratives about young people as lockdown {\textquoteleft}rule breakers{\textquoteright} and demonstrated the immediate pressures that they faced vis-{\`a}-vis family and social life, well-being, and education and employment. Going further than most recent COVID-19 research – and in disagreement with the notion of a so-called COVID generation – we locate these pressures of the moment within the already hostile social-economic conditions that existed for young people in the UK pre-COVID and a discussion of the pressures to come, particularly in terms of longer-term labour market conditions and outcomes. Amidst very rapidly changing political and economic circumstances in the UK, continuing precarity for young people seems to be one certainty. We conclude by identifying some important priorities for youth research.",
keywords = "COVID-19, Pandemic, precarity, inequality, labour market",
author = "Robert MacDonald and Hannah King and Murphy, {Emma C} and Wendy Gill",
note = "Funding Information: The research was supported by the Youth Futures Foundation and by Huddersfield and Durham Universities. The Department of Sociology at the University of Durham operates a two-week turn around for ethical approval applications; this, and the fact that the researchers were already working together on related projects, meant that we could commence research on the pandemic speedily, as its effects began to unroll. We selected North East England for largely pragmatic reasons: we needed to limit the geographic scope of the study to make it feasible and it is the place where we have long-standing connections with agencies like the North East Youth Alliance and Children North East, who we collaborated with in undertaking the research, hoping it would be of value to charities like these and therefore, ultimately, to young people themselves. Like other UK regions, it contains wide social inequalities that are relevant to the study of the pandemic but we have not undertaken a systematic comparison with other regions and we do not present our findings as being {\textquoteleft}North East specific{\textquoteright} (but, as we will show, our findings are similar to those from national studies). Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.",
year = "2024",
month = may,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1080/13676261.2022.2163884",
language = "English",
volume = "27",
pages = "723--740",
journal = "Journal of Youth Studies",
issn = "1367-6261",
publisher = "Routledge",
number = "5",
}
