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This original collection draws on the latest empirical research to explore the practical challenges facing happiness researchers today. By uniquely combining the critical approach of sociology with techniques from other disciplines, the contributors illuminate new qualitative and biographical approaches of the study of happiness and well-being.

This book examines the meaning of happiness in Britain today, and observes that although we face challenges such as austerity, climate change and disenchantment with politics, we continue to be interested in happiness and living well. The author illustrates how happiness is a far more contested, social process than is often portrayed by economists and psychologists, and takes issue with sociologists who often regard wellbeing and the happiness industry with suspicion, whilst neglecting one of the key features of being human - the quest for a good life. Exploring themes that question what it means to be happy and live a good life in Britain today, such as the challenges young people face making their way through education and into their first jobs; work life-balance; mid-life crises; and old age, the book presents nineteen life stories that call for a far more critical and ambitious approach to happiness research that marries the radicalism of sociology, with recent advances in psychology and economics.0This book will appeal to students and academics interested in wellbeing, happiness and quality of life and also those researching areas such as the life course, work-life balance, biographies, aging and youth studies

Mainstream British sociology has curiously neglected happiness studies despite growing interest in wellbeing in recent years. Sociologists often view happiness as a problematic, subjective phenomenon, linked to problems of modernity such as consumerism, alienation and anomie. This construction of 'happiness as a problem' has a long history from Marx and Durkheim to contemporary writers such as Ahmed and Furedi. Using qualitative interview data, I illustrate how lay accounts of happiness suggest it is experienced in far more 'social' ways than these traditional subjective constructions. We should therefore be wary of using crude representations of happiness as vehicles for our traditional depictions of modernity. Such 'thin' accounts of happiness have inhibited a serious sociological engagement with the things that really matter to ordinary people, such as our efforts to balance suffering and flourishing in our daily lives.

chapter 1 Introduction: Studying Young People in Late Modernity -- chapter 2 Young Offenders, Risk and Personal Development Programmes -- chapter 3 Young People and Illicit Drug Use in Postmodern Times? -- chapter 4 Victims of Risk? Young People and the Construction of Lifestyles -- chapter 5 Global Clubcultures: Cultural Flows and Late Modern Dance Music Culture -- chapter 6 Research on Youth Transitions: Some Critical Interventions -- chapter 7 New Deal or Raw Deal? Dilemmas and Paradoxes of State Interventions into the Youth Labour Market -- chapter 8 Domestic and Housing Transitions and the Negotiation of Intimacy -- chapter 9 Ignoring the Past: Under-Employment and Risk in Late Modernity.

This paper draws on qualitative data from three research projects that examined the impact of poor skills on the life chances of adults living in two disadvantaged areas of England. We employed the theories of Goffman and Bourdieu to document how problems with literacy have a corrosive effect on the identities of interviewees, threatening their wellbeing. Though learning difficulties occur across all social backgrounds, the poor family resources and educational opportunities of our respondents meant they struggled to overcome their literacy problems when young, thus shaping later life course transitions. Thus the origins of the shame that our adults felt about their poor skills lie in part in the distinctive classed experiences they had when young. However, the resourcefulness of our respondents meant that many had secured employment, bought homes and become parents which obscured the ongoing psychic problems that a lifetime of poor skills had bestowed on our sample. The disjuncture between the apparent material standing of our sample and the 'hidden injuries of class' raises questions about how we understand the operation of class across the life course and the role of literacy, learning and wellbeing in the shaping of social identities.

This article reports on the findings of a qualitative research project conducted in the North East of England. This project involved interviews with 55 young adults in an attempt to explore the impact of poor basic skills on transitions to adulthood. Poor basic skills have been identifued across Europe as a problem facing nation states, groups and individuals. But apart from large-scale survey-based studies (Bynner and Parsons, 2001), previous youth research has neglected the process through which basic skills play a role in transitions to adulthood. Proposing a social theory of situated basic skills as communal and individual resources, the authors develop an approach that is sensitive to both structure and agency in theorizing the role of literacy, numeracy and oracy in transitions. They claim that the mobilization of basic skills resources and their role across the life-course can best be understood by using a conceptualization of agency that recognizes the importance of reflexivity as a mediating link between subjective (agential) and objective (structural) dimensions of transition.

This paper focuses on one aspect of the work of Education Action Zones (EAZs) that has been neglected by emerging research, namely their efforts to tackle social exclusion and empower a more representative set of parents to become involved in policy-making processes for education in their localities. Data from three EAZs across the country are presented to demonstrate that empowerment of parents through zones is restricted. Instead, the interests of educational professionals, and to a lesser extent those parents who have previously been socially and politically active, predominate across EAZs. The paper claims that the assumptions pervading the discourses of powerful coalitions across EAZs and their discursive competencies are actually presenting a barrier to wider parental empowerment in the form envisaged in policy texts and the rhetoric of ministers.

Cover -- Half-Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Table and Figures -- Acknowledgements -- Notes on Contributors -- Introduction: Contemporary Youth Research: Issues, Controversies and Dilemmas -- Part 1 Youth Research in Context -- 1 Problems and Priorities for the Sociology of Youth -- 2 Mods and Shockers: Youth Cultural Studies in Britain -- Part 2 Principles of Practice -- 3 Framing Youth: Reviewing Locally Commissioned Research on Young People, Drug Use and Drug Education -- 4 Practice-based Research as Development: Innovation and Empowerment in Youth Intervention Initiatives using Collaborative Action Inquiry -- 5 Onions and Apples: Problems with Comparative European Youth Research -- Part 3 Reflections on Fieldwork -- 6 Ethnography in Practice: A Case Study Illustration -- 7 Researching Young Women's Bodies: Values, Dilemmas and Contradictions -- 8 E-heads Versus Beer Monsters: Researching Young People's Music and Drug Consumption in Dance Club Settings -- Part 4 Issues in Ethnography -- 9 Double Exposure: Exploring the Social and Political -- 10 Researching Young People as Consumers: Can and Should We Ask Them Why? -- 11 The Use of 'Insider' Knowledge in Ethnographic Research on Contemporary Youth Music Scenes -- Bibliography -- Index.