A large proportion of the differences in students’ school outcomes is dependent on factors outside school, and if we accept the premise that success at school provides the foundation for young people’s future opportunities in life, it can be claimed that the reason for greater or fewer opportunities for self-fulfilment lies in factors relating to the family, residential area, network and social power structure. Thus the starting point for our research interest in this field is the fact that we are unable to understand why things are progressing as they are – i.e. more poorly – for a significant proportion of schools and their students located in structurally disadvantaged and multicultural areas if we only focus on what happens in school. If policies merely focus on deploying better headteachers, better teachers, more advanced skills teachers and teachers of Swedish as a second language. Or if we merely focus on what is happening in “segregated” areas themselves. These are important initiatives. But without setting our sights higher and contextualising students’ living conditions and staff working conditions, opportunities, difficulties and limit-defining practices that they encounter every day, we will be unable to make inroads into the vicious circle presented by social and cultural reproduction. An understanding of and interventions in what are known as “the ecologies of places” are also required.
Working on the basis of various theories, analytical concepts, previous research and extensive empirical data, we intend to lay the foundation or an understanding of this process and the outcome that we term “the new social heritage”. By this, we mean a set of interwoven individual and structural factors that simultaneously provide and close off opportunities, that pave the way for freedom of individual actions while also limiting them. The new social heritage is not a psychological mechanism, but a socially imposed approach with the associated individual and collective practices relating to individual opportunity horizons. We interpret difference as meaning both inequality in life opportunities and living conditions, but also as cultural and ethnic diversity and the diversity of individual social and educational needs that are objectively found in these areas, permeating their social ecologies and their schools.
Another significant starting point is that we are focusing not only on problems and failures. We also want to point out things that are working well, creating opportunities, strengthening the resilience of children and adolescents and leading to the new social heritage – reinforced with diversity and how individuals, families, groups and institutions manage ecologies for areas – having a positive impact on their life opportunities.
Research project
Children and adolescents’ life conditions – social ecologies, success at school and health
This project is guided by two fundamental interests. The first is scientifically oriented in the sense that our ambition is to use theoretically informed analyses of the extensive data gathered from a number of residential areas in the Stockholm region using different methods to add new knowledge to the broad research field relating to conditions in which children and adolescents grow up. Resources and relationships in the residential area, the ways in which schools manage equity in an environment characterised by vast social differences and segregation, and adolescent health are three main perspectives.
Our other fundamental interest is policy-oriented. Our ambition is to work together with officers in a number of municipalities in the Stockholm region to use the research outcomes as a basis for specific policy proposals, and to assist municipalities, their institutions and civil society in the implementation of the measures proposed. Besides providing knowledge-based assistance for the implementation itself, the project also includes ongoing research into the implementation process.
Funded by: Gålöstiftelsen
Period: 2018-2023, SEK 10 million allocated
Participating researchers: Nihad Bunar, professor, project manager (Department of Special Education, Stockholm University); Kari Trost, docent (Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University); Mirjam Hagström, fil.dr. (Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University)
