Carving out space for collective action: a study on how girls respond to everyday stressors within leisure participation

Abstract

Purpose: Stress and achievement pressure constitute factors affecting young people's mental health, especially among girls. Leisure participation holds the potential to be a collective space where young people can respond to stressors together. This study explores how girls collectively construct responses to daily stressors within the context of leisure participation. Methods: Nine focus groups were conducted with 16 girls aged 14-21 who were active members in two sport organizations in northern Sweden. Data was collected by using participatory observations and photo-elicited focus group discussions. Results: Our findings from the inductive thematic analysis were interpreted by combining the stress process model with social practice theory, resulting in three subthemes or responses: sharing sites of responsibility, resisting norms related to (gendered) youth and focused distraction. The subthemes were abstracted into the central theme of trustful belonging as a resource for collective responses, representing what preconditions need to be in place to make the responses possible. Conclusion: Leisure participation is an important relational space for young people to respond to stressors by making use of everyday routines, and the agency these social practices hold. However, the effort needed to respond to these stressors brought additional pressure in terms of responsibilities, and achievements.

Precarious leisure in a teenage wasteland? Intertwining discourses on responsibility and girls’ place-making in rural Northern Sweden

“…Data were collected by the first author between October 2017 and December 2018. The data used in this study was taken from a larger corpus of data collected for an ethnographic research project on young people's mental health and leisure (Gotfredsen, Goicolea, and Landstedt 2020).…”

“…Young people might see 'rural boredom' as a challenge to overcome, and that carving out space for recreation, play, and social vitality in rural contexts relies on the agency and capacity of the individual (Gotfredsen, Goicolea, and Landstedt 2020;Leyshon 2008;Powell, Taylor, and Smith 2013). Previous research has highlighted how such creative practices deployed by young people are used as strategies to negotiate structural constraints and create spaces of their own (Massey 1998;Woodman and Leccardi 2015).…”

“…Studies have emphasized the importance of leisure in relation to coping with stress in youth (Park and Kim 2018), positive youth development (Bruner et al 2017) and defining positive mental health (Hall, McKinstry, and Hyett 2016). In this article, we draw upon findings from a previous study on social factors of young people's mental health, civic engagement and collective responses to stressors within the context of leisure participation (Gotfredsen, Goicolea, and Landstedt 2020). The participants emphasized the role of the rural locale and discursively constructed places of leisure in relation to health and wellbeing.…”

“…Responding to the limited literature in this area, we acknowledge that, just as urban youth leisure holds multiple elements of subcultures, so does rural youth leisure (see for example Haartsen and Strijker (2010) on the Dutch Keten; King and Church (2013) on mountain biking and Laegran (2002) on rural technospaces). We argue that more attention should be given to social places of leisure that young people create themselves, and the effort this requires, especially in rural areas (Gotfredsen, Goicolea, and Landstedt 2020).…”

The Promise of Belonging: Racialized Youth Subject Positions in the Swedish Rural North

“…I have to learn something. (DG 12) A general trend towards centralization and neoliberal policies in the Swedish welfare state during the last few decades has contributed to the downscaling and/or closing down of services in rural areas (Enlund, 2020;Gotfredsen et al, 2020;Jonsson et al, 2020). For migrants living in such areas, this has consequences for the pathway to inclusion.…”