Girls growing up
Girls Growing Up is a qualitative, longitudinal research project that examines the everyday lives and imagined futures of young girls and women aged 15-25.
Overview
Girls Growing Up is a qualitative, longitudinal research project that examines the everyday lives and imagined futures of young girls and women aged 15-25, who have left the mainstream school system before finishing Year 12 or have in other ways have their transitional pathways interrupted. The project is funded by the Australian Research Council and runs from 2017 to 2020.
Rather than focusing on specific ‘risk factors’, this project investigates the connections and disconnections in the girls’ everyday lives, as well as the resources that the girls have available. The longitudinal design of the project enables a focus on every day, micro-level aspects of marginalisation processes and how these play out at a subjective level over time; a focus crucial for understanding individuals’ agency and orientations, and the multi-method approach generates rich and nuanced data. By deliberately situating the research in locations undergoing economic and labour market changes, the research will speak to the challenges arising from this for young people growing up in these places. The project engages with key questions about micro-processes of marginalisation, temporality and subjectivity with a particular focus on relations to place and belonging.