Youth cultures in Britain: the middle class take-over

This article discusses the character of Britain's youth cultures at the end of the 1980s using evidence from the ESRC 16–19 Initiative's longitudinal studies among representative samples from four parts of Britain. The females had the highest social contact scores and equalled the males' levels of overall leisure activity. The females' leisure was not particularly restricted or centred around a bedroom culture although males were the more active in sport, and over-represented among the most committed minorities in all kinds of public leisure. The main social class differences were that middle class youth were slightly the more leisure active overall, had closer relationships with their friends, and, like the males compared with the females, were over-represented among the most committed participants in out-of-home leisure in general. There was no evidence of either middle or working class youth cultures expressing class specific values. There were some relationships between the young people's leisure styles and their social attitudes and self-concepts. Those heavily involved in popular music and politics tended to be more egalitarian on gender issues than young people who were more involved in sport and drink. Also, strong attachment to any kind of popular music was related to social estrangement. However, none of these differences separated middle from working class youth at leisure. Virtually all leisure activities and types of sociability linked rather than separated young people in different social class locations. Since one of the main social class differences was that middle class youth were over-represented among those more heavily involved whatever the type of leisure, by the late 1980s young people's leisure seemed to have become yet another milieu in which middle class dominance was the rule.