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Children and youth of color in White and adult-dominated societies confront racism and adultism that shapes their peer cultures. Yet, the “new” sociology of childhood lacks the theory and methodology to explore racialized peer cultures. Thus, this chapter aims to sharpen its research tools. Theoretically, this chapter draws from Technologies of the Self (Foucault, 1988) and Critical Race Theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012) to enhance Valentine’s (1997) “adult-youth binary” and Corsaro’s (2015) “interpretive reproduction.” Methodologically, it combines the “doing research with children” approach (Greig, Taylor, & MacKay, 2013) with Critical Race Methodology (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) to do research with youth of color. These enhanced research tools are then used to explore how boys and girls of color (n = 150), 9- to 17-year olds, experience peer culture in suburban schools, under police surveillance, and on social media. In the field, interviewers navigated their adult privilege and racial/ethnic positionalities in relation to that of participants and the racial dynamic in the research setting, ultimately aiming to co-create a safe space for counter-storytelling. As a result, this chapter captured how White-dominated peer cultures used racial microaggressions against youth of color in suburban schools, boy peer cultures navigated racialized policing, and online-offline peer cultures curtailed protective and controlling racialized adult surveillance. Theoretically, the racially enhanced interpretive reproduction and adult-youth binary exposed the adultism-racism intersection that shapes youth peer cultures. Methodologically, counter-storytelling revealed the painful realities that youth of color face and that those with adult and/or White privilege would rather ignore.

The No Child Left Behind Act (2002) and Race to the Top (2009) led to the highest rate of standardized-state testing in the history of the United States of America. As a result, the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) aims to reevaluate standardized-state testing. Previous research has assessed its impact on schools, educators, and students; yet, youth’s voices are almost absent. Therefore, this qualitative analysis examines how youth of color perceive and experience standardized-state testing.

Seventy-three youth participated in a semistructured interview during the summer of 2015. The sample consists of 34 girls and 39 boys, 13–18 years of age, of African American, Latino/a, Jamaican American, multiracial/ethnic, and other descent. It includes 6–12th graders who attended 61 inter-district and intra-district schools during the 2014–2015 academic year in a Northeastern metropolitan area in the United States that is undergoing a racial/ethnic integration reform.

Youth experienced testing overload under conflicting adult authorities and within an academically stratified peer culture on an ever-shifting policy terrain. While the parent-adult authority remained in the periphery, the state-adult authority intrusively interrupted the teacher-student power dynamics and the disempowered teacher-adult authority held youth accountable through the “attentiveness” rhetoric. However, youth’s perspectives and lived experiences varied across grade levels, school modalities, and school-geographical locations.

In this adult-dominated society, the market approach to education reform ultimately placed the burden of teacher and school evaluation on youth. Most importantly, youth received variegated messages from their conflicting adult authorities that threatened their academic journeys.

This paper introduces two methodological innovations for qualitative research. We apply these innovations to holistically understand youth peer cultures and improve participant-driven qualitative methodology.

It moves the methodological frontier forward by blending technology with the “go-along” approach used by ethnographers to prioritize participants’ perspectives and experiences within their socio-cultural contexts.

We introduce the youth-centered and participant-driven virtual tours, including a neighborhood tour using Google Maps designed to explore how youth navigate their socio-spatial environments (n = 64; 10–17 year-olds; 2013) and a social media tour designed to explore how youth navigate their networked publics (n = 50; 10–17 year-olds; 2013), both in relation to their local peer cultures.

Applicable to a wide range of research populations, the Google Maps tour and the social media tour give the qualitative researcher additional tools to conduct participant-driven research into youths’ socio-cultural worlds. These two innovations help to address challenges in youth research as well as qualitative research more broadly. We find, for example, that the “go-along” aspect of the virtual tour minimizes the perceived threat of the researcher’s adult status and brings youth participants’ perspectives and experiences to the center of inquiry in the study of local peer cultures.

Rooted in adult fear, adult authority aims to protect and control youth (Gannon, 2008; Valentine, 1997). Continuously negotiating for freedom, youth search for adult-free public spaces and are therefore extremely attracted to social networking sites (boyd, 2007, 2014). However, a significant portion of youth now includes adult authorities within their Facebook networks (Madden et al., 2013). Thus, this study explores how youth navigate familial- and educational-adult authorities across social networking sites in relation to their local peer culture.

Through semi-structured interviews, including youth-centered and participant-driven social media tours, 82 youth from the Northeast region of the United States of America (9–17 years of age; 43 females and 39 males) shared their lived experiences and perspectives about social media during the summer of 2013.

In their everyday lives, youth are subjected to the normative expectations emerging from peer culture, school, and family life. Within these different and at times conflicting normative schemas, youth’s social media use is subject to adult authority. In response, youth develop intricate ways to navigate adult authority across social networking sites.

Adult fear is powerful, but fragile to youth’s interpretation; networked publics are now regulated and youth’s ability to navigate then is based on their social location; and youth’s social media use must be contextualized to be holistically understood.

Purpose – To examine how youth appropriate and resist elements of the developmental discourse as they construct and enforce dating norms.

Methodology – In 2007, we conducted participant observation at a middle school summer camp for youth in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. Youth ranged in age from 11 to 17 years old.

Findings – Youth borrowed the idea of a normative sequence of behaviors arranged by age from the developmental discourse to establish a set of age-appropriate dating norms for all campers, regardless of chronological age. Youth enforced these norms by treating other dating actions as too young or too old. By tying this linear trajectory to social age instead of chronological age, youth creatively altered the apparently rigid developmental discourse and established dating norms which addressed their own values and concerns. Youth established dating norms and maximized opportunities for pleasurable, collective discussions about dating and romantic relationships. Although the developmental discourse influenced the norms in this peer culture, we argue that the small, heterogeneous composition of the camp facilitated youths' ability to appropriate, refashion, and resist the developmental discourse.

This study illustrates how youth and young adults use boundary-making processes to create a regulated community online.

Ethnographic methods are used to compare deviance models of internet participation with work on digital youth culture.

This paper finds that digital youth draw boundaries around three categories of participation (n00bs, trolls, and idols) to identify new people who need help, ward off bullies, and uphold community ideals.

Contrary to deviance perspectives, this study finds that digital youth use boundary-making processes to cultivate a civil online community.

Volume 14 of Sociological Studies of Children and Youth (SSCY) is comprised of empirical research and theoretical papers within three areas, namely children's well-being, children and youth peer cultures, and the rights of children and youth. In this volume, the term “children” is used inclusively to encompass those from infancy through the transition to adulthood. These empirical studies include children's voices and experiences from four continents and a range of methodological and theoretical orientations. Additionally, a clear connection to social policy is made in many of these studies. Altogether, these studies highlight how structure and culture both limit and enable the life chances of children, how children interpret and construct their social relations and environments, and finally, how children view themselves as well as how others view the rights of children.

Examines connections between family life, self‐esteem, health and lifestyles in a sample of around 1,700 young people aged 14 to 16 years old in eight rural locations in northern Scotland. Young people’s accounts of family life were characterised in terms of quality of relationships, support, family‐centredness, control and conflict. A minority of rural youth were highly negative about home life, and one in six reported low self‐esteem and poor mental health. Certain characteristics contained in young people’s accounts of family life were found to be associated with feelings of self‐esteem, subjective wellbeing and health behaviours. Additionally, self‐esteem was associated with self‐assessments of health, but not directly with health‐relevant behaviour, contrary to a prevalent assumption in health education. More detailed analysis shows that links between perceived family life and self‐esteem and health behaviour are felt quite separately from each other. However, the impact that young persons’ feelings about their home life have on self‐esteem does help to explain links between family practices and health, particularly mental health, in youth.

This paper addresses the lack of conceptual and theoretical consensus around cyber-bullying and problems associated with over-reliance on mainstream criminological thinking to explain this phenomenon.

The paper offers a critical criminological perspective on cyber-bullying encouraging scholars to engage with fundamental complications associated with the relationship between late-modernity, neo-liberalism and cyber-bullying. It argues for an approach that contextualizes cyber-bullying within the realities and consequences of late-modernity and neo-liberalism.

The paper argues that a robust understanding of cyber-bullying entails contextualization of the problem in terms of the realities of consumption, individualism, youth identity formation and incivility in late modern society.

In addition to challenging extant theoretical approaches to cyber-bullying, the paper has important implications for intervention that surpass the limitations of law and order policies which tend to focus on criminalizing poorly understood bad behaviour or indicting internet technologies themselves.