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This article examines favourite places of samples of adolescents living in the island state of Tasmania, Australia. Results from four separate but related studies are presented which relate the discursive geographies of youth to their leisure pursuits.Young people's reasons for choosing places which make them feel good, and the sorts of leisure activities which they enjoy there, are examined in relation to theories of space as a cultural construct and international studies of place attachment and place experience. The analysis combines ethnographic and quantitative methods to explore the meanings of private and public space for youth. Goffman's concepts of frontstage and backstage regions are used to explain the relationship between adolescents' use of inside and outside space. Findings suggest that adolescent preferences for home, own bedroom, and places in the natural environment express ways of redefining the boundaries of private space as the practical embodiment of intergenerational power relationships.

Research among students with physical and sensory disabilities who have succeeded in continuing their education at post‐compulsory level as far as higher education, revealed that they have a high level of perceived personal control. This is strongly linked with educational attainment irrespective of severity of disability. The emphasis of these students upon self‐help groups, and institutional response to student needs within a discourse of rights, rather than of welfare, has lessons for equity policy and practice with respect to other disadvantaged groups. The wider implications of intervention strategies and compensation programs which label and further marginalise members of disadvantaged groups are explored in the paper, in the context of the social construction of categories of disadvantage and difference, the analysis of competing discourses and social trends of individualisation and globalisation.

The influence of risk perceptions on risk activities of teenagers is well known, but the development of indices, which combine measures of perception as well as behavioral outcomes, has proved problematical. This article discusses the ways in which this methodological problem was tackled within a five‐year, multiphase, multimethod study of factors affecting adolescent risk‐taking in Tasmania, Australia, which included an intergenerational comparison of adolescents and parents. The development of the Risk Activity by Personal Risk Assessment (RAPRA) Index combines measures of perceived riskiness of 26 activities identified by young people as involving varying degrees of risk, with the degree of participation by each respondent, through a rectangular model of weights. The Personal Risk Score Category (PRISC) Index summarizes and categorizes an individual's risk‐taking profile relative to the group's risk values and risk hierarchy established by the RAPRA Index. The article discusses ways in which technical problems involved in combining measures of risk perceptions and risk activities were addressed during index construction, compared with examples in the literature. Some key findings from analysis of two student and parent samples are presented as exemplars of the methods used and the results produced. Findings demonstrate the widespread nature of risk‐taking among teenagers, and the similarity of levels of risk‐taking between teenager and parental generations. The indices allow for detailed comparison of particular risk‐taking activities and reveal differences among teenagers now compared with parents when they were teenagers, and illustrate the dynamic cultural context of risk‐taking perceptions and values.

The research explored constructs of potentially harmful adolescent risk-taking of 220 university students in their final year of degree courses in education, law, medicine, nursing, psychology and social work, who anticipated they would be dealing with young people professionally. Their personal risk hierarchies, and their own experience of risk-taking when they were teenagers, were investigated as potential influences upon the normative orientations of their future professional roles, expressed in their support for varying social policy options including zero tolerance and harm minimization. Findings suggest that their commitment to underlying value positions regarding risk-taking and risk-management were not significantly related to gender, age or personal risk-taking profiles but to professional socialization in their degree course. The implications of respondents' preferred ways of dealing with adolescent risk-taking as compared to young people's choices for themselves are explored, along with concepts of risk management in current policy frameworks.