Dreams of the Future in an Era of Change: Longitudinal Qualitative Research Speaks Back to Policy Studies.

This paper examines young peoples' ideas and their dreams of the future. It is part of a longitudinal study in which students at four schools in Australia were interviewed twice a year during their time in secondary school. The paper claims that this long-term engagement with individuals heightened specificity of the dreams, though it was difficult to interpret this specificity in interactions with more general processes. The study draws attention to the types of questions researchers ask and self-reflectively questions how the research affects the students in the study, and whether the young people were making reflexive judgments about themselves and about the researchers. The first section of the report considers three male students of non-English backgrounds and illustrates the problem with "data-base" type representations of ethnicity as a single construct of advantage or disadvantage, as well as some issues relating to how the study may affect the students in it. The second section explores girls' aspirations and discusses findings from the study. The article examines the different influences of ethnicity among the students and the ways in which cultural change, educational reform, and gendered psychology may be producing certain orientations to the future in early adolescent middle-class girls. Contains 21 references. (RJM) ******************************************************************************** * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * from the original document. * ******************************************************************************** AERA Conference, San Diego, USA 1998 Paper for Symposium: 'Creating Others": debating methods, findings and contexts in studying young people today an international dialogue. Dreams of the future in an era of change: longitudinal qualitative research speaks back to policy studies Lyn Yates La Trobe University Lyn. Yates@latrobe.edu. au U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CEt hNTaEs beRtEeRn C Ais docum Ire) rrh produced as received from the person or organization originating it. 0 Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official GERI position or policy. PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) 1 . people always ask you what you want to be when you grow up and I just have no idea. so I've kind of thought about it. cos they kind of put you on the spot and they can make you feel like you have to know what you're doing. so you kind of have to think about it. (12 year old girl, at the beginning of secondary school; WL.94b Clare: Sometimes I just meet some people, and it's just like, "what do you want to do in your life? " Like, "um, I don't know". Serena: But so many people say that now. I've said that to so many people, 'well I don't know' , and they say, :yeah, lots of people say that'. Alice: sometimes you just say it because you don't really want to go into it. Sometimes I feel it's like a personal thing. You are sort of working out what you want to do, and you just sort of you're not definite, you don't know what's going to happen . (13 year old girls, WA.95a, p.9) You just sort of have dreams, but some of them you know probably won't come true. (13 year old, WK.95a, p.8) The final decades of the twentieth century have been an era of large-scale economic and cultural change. In Australia at least, a core concern of a large range of education reforms has been to reshape young people's ideas and ambitions about the future: to prepare them better for the range of jobs that will exist in the future; to reshape their ideas of their role as a man or as a woman. But how do shifts in economic context or in education policy actually engage with the fantasies, intentions, dreams and development over time of young people? And how do educational researchers communicate with students about these matters and with what effect? My opening quotes, and the remainder of this paper, are taken from work in progress on a qualitative, longitudinal study of young people at four schools in Australia. In it, Julie McLeod and I are interviewing the same students twice a year through the course of their 2 BESTCOPYAVAII ARI 1