Berrington, ESRC, Aspirations and Realities for Living and Learning in the 21st Century

This research project sets out to further our understanding of how young adults' experience of education and employment relate to their ambitions and success in achieving residential independence and appropriate housing in the UK, and how these relationships are modified by gender and, for the first time, ethnicity. Recent years have been characterised by significant economic, social and cultural change, with contemporary young adults' transitions to adulthood in the UK altered by further deterioration of the youth labour market, expansion of higher education, increased unaffordability of housing, rapidly changing family contexts within which individuals are brought up and increased diversity of experience associated with second and third generation migrant groups. In this context, we need to re-develop our understanding of the contemporary transition to adulthood independence. Past research has tended to polarise youth into those who experience so-called fast track transitions to adulthood, for example, through early, often chaotic, home leaving and those, often more advantaged youth, who are characterised by slow track transitions including delayed partnership and parenthood. Such a characterisation is too simplistic, however, and tends to ignore the moderating roles of gender and ethnicity. Furthermore, existing research, policy attention and media interest has tended to be focused either on problematic groups such as young parents or those not in employment, education or training (NEETs), or on the weakening jobs market for recent graduates and the perceived trend for graduates to increasingly move back into the parental home on completing their studies. This research seeks to provide a holistic overview of the experience of the full range of young people to deliver a comprehensive conceptualisation of young people's housing careers. The proposed work is situated at the confluence of a number of fields of research including demographic transitions to adulthood; sociological debates concerning the roles of choice and constraint in pathways to adulthood; the impact of social policy on young adult's housing careers and inter-generational support between parents and their adult children. We will work in an interdisciplinary manner bringing together experts on youth transitions from the fields of sociology, education and social demography to deliver high impact policy and practitioner relevant research. The project will contribute to capacity building in advanced quantitative methods through the appointment of a Research Fellow and the up-skilling of the Co-I who is currently an expert in qualitative methods. Under the guidance of the PI, who is an expert in longitudinal methods, both the Research Fellow and Co-I will enhance their skills in the analysis of large and complex longitudinal datasets. The research involves exploitation of several key data resources: UKHLS, EHS and HESA statistics. These data will enable us to answer the following interrelated research questions. 1) How do young adult's living arrangements vary according to their profiles of education, employment and parenthood? 2) What are the determinants of leaving home and boomeranging back into the parental home? 3) What factors are associated with leaving home for Higher Education (HE)? 4) What factors are associated with young peoples' aspirations for education and residential independence? How do these aspirations interrelate? For each of these questions we are particularly interested in how these relationships differ by gender and ethnicity. We will use this empirical evidence to put forward a new conceptualisation of young adults' housing careers and identify a series of implications for demographic projections and social policy. As a result of our existing engagement with Government policy makers and stakeholders we are confident that this research will have significant impact on both academic and non-academic users.