Gary Pollock

Manchester Metropolitan University | MMU · Department of Sociology

This paper presents the results of cognitive interviews with 8-year-old children from four European countries – Croatia, France, Finland, and Ireland. The aim of the interviews was to pre-test a selection of well-being-related questions as a part of questionnaire development for the first European multinational birth cohort study – Growing up in Di...

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) represents one of the most common psychological problems of today. It received a great deal of attention over the past two decades. Still, relatively little is known about its prevalence and its impact on students in higher education (HE). The other two variables that need to be added to this equation are those of chil...

Child well-being has an explicit connection with UN Sustainable Development Goals. Progress in tackling these goals require robust evidence, such as can be provided by high quality survey data. Birth cohort surveys are an important source of evidence for policy makers seeking to protect and enhance the lives of children as they grow up. Until now s...

Introduction The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which includes 17 global goals, charts an ambitious course for the coming decade and beyond. Attached to the goals are 169 targets, which lay out the specific aims towards which the global community is working. In total, 95 of the targets are either directly (48) or indirectly (47) connected...

Over the last thirty years voter turnout in elections at both national and European levels has in many countries fallen albeit with some notable increases in the most recent years. This, together with a decline in the perception of political efficacy and falling trust in political institutions, has been argued to have resulted in a democratic defic...

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is neither just shyness, nor for most victims does it merely involve an inability to speak in public. For most sufferers of this disorder, it could be a pervasive, disabling condition that steals away opportunities for a richer, fuller life. Having an early onset and combining high prevalence rates with serious negativ...

The toll of workplace bullying is immense, yet, similarly as with an iceberg, its scope, scale and implications tend to remain underestimated. Several ways of assessing the prevalence of workplace bullying have been proposed in the literature. The most frequently discussed are the ‘subjective method’ assessing individuals’ perceptions of being a vi...

Longitudinal studies have a number of challenges in terms of data collection and analysis including sample attrition, panel conditioning, coverage error, time and cost. In addition, variability exists among European nations as to the availability and coverage of sampling frames, laws and regulations that restrict aspects of survey practice, availab...

The book has so far exposed the policy needs and benefits, as well as the challenges, of implementing a cross-national longitudinal survey on children and young people’s well-being. This concluding chapter focuses on how the MYWeB project came to recommend a national accelerated survey design with a view to suggest a way forwards for a pan-European...

There has been a growing interest among academics, policy makers and practitioners in the subjective well-being of children and young people (CYP). The recognition of CYP’s rights to having a good childhood and good future life chances, coupled with the injunction from the New Sociology of Childhood to consult with CYP as active agents have resulte...

This concluding chapter reflects on the challenges of conducting ‘complex’ social science research using the experience of the MYPLACE project. It recognises the compromises to methodological conformism necessary for its successful implementation and seeks to elicit the ‘value added’ gained. It explores, specifically, whether: the case study based...

This chapter provides the rationale for the research design of the survey element of the MYPLACE project. It contends that, in the study of youth participation, the survey method is best undertaken in defined research locations, allowing data to be analysed in conjunction with known local socio-historical experiences. The MYPLACE project demonstrat...

In the introductory chapter to this volume, the editors reflect on the experience of conducting pan-European research (in 30 locations in 14 countries) into young people’s civic and political engagement as part of the MYPLACE (Memory, Youth, Political Legacy and Civic Engagement) project. They outline the central research questions and the rational...

This chapter explores the attitudes of young people to the EU in carefully chosen research locations in Greece, Germany and the UK. Euroscepticism in Britain has been fuelled by populist discourses. On the other hand, European identity has been part of German identity since World War Two. For Greece, EU membership has been seen as a road to moderni...

This edited volume presents findings from a major cross-European research project mapping the civic and political engagement of young Europeans in the context of both shared and diverse political heritages. Drawing on new survey, interview and ethnographic data, the authors discuss substantive issues relating to young people’s attitudes and activis...

This volume presents key findings from the EU funded Measuring Youth Well-being (MYWeB) project which assessed the feasibility of a European Longitudinal Study for Children and Young People (ELSCYP). It draws on the original empirical data from a panel of experts in the field of child well-being as well as field experiences from a number of Europea...

Youth well-being is becoming more central to European social policies both in the EU and at a national level. The study of well being has come far in recent years such that the focus has shifted from understandings with a focus on objective measures towards a nuanced analyses including a variety of social and psychological dimensions. At the same t...

This introductory article introduces the MYPLACE (Memory, Youth, Political Legacy and Civic Engagement) project, the findings of which are the basis of the articles in this volume. MYPLACE maps the relationship between political heritage, current levels and forms of civic and political engagement of young people in Europe, and their potential recep...

Forms of populism have long been a component of modern political discourse and systems where democracy relies upon popular legitimacy. There is, however, an uneasy relationship between some widely held views of ‘the people’ and the parties which seek to govern them. Contemporary academic and political discourse on populism often equates these views...

There has been a growing interest among academics, policy makers and practitioners in the subjective well-being of children and young people (CYP). The recognition of CYP’s rights to having a good childhood and good future life chances, coupled with the injunction from the New Sociology of Childhood to consult with CYP as active agents have also re...

Purpose of this paper This study evaluates the impact of Vision Housing’s provision of housing and support on re-offending rates. Established in 2007, Vision Housing is a small London-based specialist housing provider working primarily with ex-offenders. Design/methodology/approach The evaluation design compared expected re-offending rates after on...

This paper identifies classes using evidence from surveys taken in 2009 among nationally representative samples of approximately 2000 households from each of the three South Caucasus countries–Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Information on employment, education and income is used to identify clusters of both individuals and households, in each cas...

Trust in political actors is currently low in all parts of Europe and the former Soviet Union. This paper proceeds by presenting recent evidence from the EU27 and the South Caucasus, and explores differences in levels of trust towards different political actors, between socio-demographic groups, and between countries. The differences are around gen...

Full-text of this article is available at http://www.academicjournals.org/ERR2/PDF/Pdf%202010/Mar/Tholen%20et%20al..pdf This paper uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative evidences to assess the ways and extent to which, by 2007/2008, higher education graduates in the South Caucasus capitals were, and were not, deriving labour market ben...

This paper presents evidence from the biographies of samples totaling 1,215 young adults in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, who all reached age 16 between 1986 and 1992, and whose subsequent life histories coincided with their countries’ transitions from communism. The evidence is used to examine whether new classes are being created in the new ma...

Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published following peer-review in Leisure Studies, published by and copyright Routledge. This paper reports findings from interview surveys with 1215 respondents, split between the capital cities (Yerevan, Baku and Tbilisi) and one non-capital region (...

Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published following peer-review in Journal of Youth Studies, published by and copyright Routledge. This paper reports evidence from surveys in 2007 which gathered life-history information since age 16 from samples totalling 1215 31-37-year-olds in the c...

This article was originally published in Eurasian Journal of Business and Economics, published by and copyright International Ataturk Alatoo University. This paper uses evidence from a series of studies of young people in a total of 12 excommunist countries, but mainly from surveys in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in 2007, and discusses changes a...

Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published following peer-review in European Physical Education Review, published by and copyright Sage. This paper presents and discusses evidence about the sport careers of representative samples of 31—37 year olds from the capital city and a comparato...

Pollock. G. Youth transitions: debates over the social context of becoming an adult. Sociology compass, 2008, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 467-484. Published by and copyright Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. The definitive version of this article is available from http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/ The study of young people has become a mainstay of social science....

Full-text of this article is available at http://socprob.ru/2008/transitions-to-adulthood-in-rural-villages-during-the-transition-from-communism-in-the-south-caucasu.html This paper presents evidence from interviews with 31–37 year olds during 2007/08 in rural villages in Aran-Mugan (Azerbaijan), Kotayk (Armenia), and Shida Kartli (Georgia). Profil...

Social science applications of sequence analysis have thus far involved the development of a typology on the basis of an analysis of one or two variables which have had a relatively low number of different states. There is a yet unexplored potential for sequence analysis to be applied to a greater number of variables and thereby a much larger state...

The analysis of employment histories has been facilitated recently by advances in survey methodology, statistical processes and computing power. While much work has focused on transitions between states and time spent in one state, the potential of analysing a series of states (i.e. careers) has largely been ignored. A concentration on movement bet...

In Britain, the period between the end of World War II and the mid 1970s witnessed an employment market which was relatively stable. Young people seeking entry into employment managed to do so with relative ease. There was a demand for labour which exceeded the supply. This stability allowed young people to be able to predict, to some extent, what...