Ken Roberts

University of Liverpool | UoL · Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology

This paper presents findings from time-use surveys in the UK, which were conducted prior to, during and following the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. These findings are set against the background of evidence from similar surveys in the UK and globally from 1920s onwards. Movements into and out of successive lockdowns between 2020 and 2021 disr...

This paper rejects the cases made in recent volumes of this journal for incorporating political economy into youth studies. A brief review of young people's transitions from education into employment in the UK during and following the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns shows how youth transitions research engages routinely with changes and continuities in pol...

Up to mid-2021 in the UK, the Covid-19 pandemic, lockdowns and Brexit had apparently created only ripples during young people progression through education and into the labour market. This has applied in most European countries, due to similar combinations of measures: 'no detriment' practices in education, job retention and business support scheme...

During the last 30 years, leisure scholars have tended to split into specialists on sport, tourism, and other "little leisures". Meanwhile, the voices of scholars who continue to write about "big leisure" rarely travel beyond their own networks. This paper explains how leisure research and theory commanded wider audiences during the early and mid-t...

While youth transitions to adulthood have been subject to various social studies, it is often the case that statistical tools of choice are limited in terms of sophistication and flexibility. Our study uses information collected as part of the SAHWA project [1] with the primary goal being to verify if machine learning can help rule out inappropriat...

This paper sets changes in Britain's class structure since 1945 alongside the parallel sociological controversies about class. Since the 1970s, the class scheme developed by John Goldthorpe and colleagues for initial use in their study of social mobility in Britain has become sociology's standard template for thinking about and researching class. V...

This paper explains how the spread of Covid-19 in early-2020 led to containment measures throughout Europe, including a legally enforced lockdown in the UK from 23 March which closed most out-of-home leisure provisions. Time use evidence is then used to show how lockdown led to an abrupt, unprecedented in scale, increase in residual ‘leisure’ time,...

Abstract This paper argues the case for viewing a country’s transition regime as a totality in which different career steps and routes assign significance and value to one another. Following the destruction of major sections of Britain’s transition regime in the 1970s and 1980s, the paper explains how the regime has subsequently been reconstructed...

This paper presents evidence from surveys in 2015-16 of nationally representative samples of approximately 2000 15-29 year olds in each of five South and East Mediterranean countries (Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia). The analysis examines the interactive effects of age, gender, family class origins (indicated by fathers' education), a...

This paper interrogates claims that millennial youth are being jilted by gilded baby boomers. The interrogation is by comparing the education and early experiences in labour and housing markets, then (when possible) the subsequent lives, of three post-1945 British cohorts: the immediate post-war cohort who completed education between 1945 and 1960,...

This paper urges resetting research into youth and leisure to match recent extensions of the life stage. It also proposes that the special mission of sociology within studies of youth and leisure should be to focus on "Big Leisure", all of it, rather than a series of "little leisures". These proposals are applied in analysing the findings from surv...

The work-leisure relationship was the pivotal issue from the 1950s–1970s when the study of leisure first became a field of collective academic endeavour in North America and the UK. Since then this relationship has declined in visibility. It is now treated as just one among several sources of social divisions alongside gender, age, ethnicity, and a...

p style="text-align: justify;">Throughout the 1980s and 90s there was international interest in the UK’s extensive experience (which began in the 1970s) with measures to alleviate youth unemployment. Today the UK attracts international attention on account of its low rates of youth unemployment and NEET, its (still) relatively rapid education-to-wo...

Saudi Arabia is changing. In 2015, King Abdullah (born 1924) died and was succeeded by King Salman, then aged 80.

Youth researchers in Europe and North America have spent recent decades noting how the life stage has been extended, and how transitions from childhood to adulthood have become more complicated and not always linear. They have noted that more young people than in the past are entering the labour market then returning to education, exiting then boom...

The central section of this chapter uses our interviewees’ own words to describe their childhood and education. This is preceded by an outline of the Saudi education system which has grown spectacularly over the last 50 years.

The previous chapter described the country. Here, we turn to what it is like to grow up, to move from child to adult, in Saudi Arabia. First, we present our approach which is to treat youth as a transitional life stage.

Housing is a ‘hot’ public and private issue in Saudi Arabia. In the press and on TV, it joins Vision 2030 , the moral hazards posed by the latest media, young people remaining single for longer and rising divorce statistics. The public housing issues concern supply (not enough) and the costs of purchasing and renting (too high and rising too steepl...

All interviewees were asked how they expected their own lives, and Saudi Arabia as a country, to change over the next five to ten years. There were some stark contrasts. Some separated the middle-class graduate husbands and their wives, who usually lived in villas, from the traditional class where the husbands were usually not university graduates....

Saudi Arabia may be the most religiously and politically conservative among all the Arab countries, but it is not a hermit kingdom. This is not the Middle East’s North Korea. This chapter explains how the country has been opened by (mostly temporary) inward and outward migration, and how new media have now brought the rest of the world into Saudis’...

As in the previous chapter, we start by outlining Saudi Arabia’s economy and workforce. We then present the labour market careers of some of our interviewees which will bring to life what it means to earn a livelihood in the present-day Kingdom.

This book uses the youth life stage as a window through which to view all domains of life in present-day Saudi Arabia: family life, education, the impact of new media, the labour market, religion and politics. The authors draw extensively on their interviews with 25-35 year olds, selected so as to represent the life chances of males and females who...

Abstract This paper sets changes in Britain’s class structure since 1945 alongside the parallel sociological controversies about class. It is argued that the sociological gaze has been weakened by opting for the dubious advantages by using the same class scheme(s) to identify changes over time, by focusing on relative social mobility and neglecting...

prThe work-leisure relationship was the pivotal issue from the 1950s-1970s when the study of leisure first became a field of collective academic endeavour in North America and the UK. Since then this relationship has declined in visibility. It is now treated as just one among several sources of social divisions alongside gender, age, ethnicity, and...

This paper uses evidence from surveys in 2015-16 of nationally representative samples comprising approximately 2000 15-29 year olds in each of five South and East Mediterranean countries. We focus on those aged 25-29 who had nearly all completed their education. We analyse the job characteristics of those in employment and identify four main employ...

Evidence on uses of free time in non-Western societies exposes and forces us to address several boundary problems in leisure studies. A combination of qualitative and quantitative evidence from nationally representative samples of 15-29 year olds in Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia finds some familiar divisions in the age group's use of...

s This paper presents evidence from quantitative surveys in 2015-16, using a fully structured and standardized questionnaire, among nationally representative samples of 15-29 year olds in five Arab Mediterranean countries (Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia). We also use complementary evidence from in-depth interviews with 29 individuals...

s Saudi Arabia rarely features in any field of English language youth studies. This is despite the availability of considerable official data in English language on young people's education, employment, and links between them, routinely analysed by gender, province and nationality. However, this evidence has never been analysed using the 'transitio...

s Saudi Arabia rarely features in any field of English language youth studies. This is despite the availability of considerable official data in English language on young people's education, employment, and links between them, routinely analysed by gender, province and nationality. However, this evidence has never been analysed using the 'transitio...

Using data from the SAHWA Youth Survey 2016 (2017), this paper presents a study of the degree and types of political and religious participation - as well as the links that connect one to the other - among the youth of five Arab Mediterranean countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Lebanon). In politics, four types of participation are dist...

This chapter explains how childhood foundations are typically laid for longer-term ‘careers’ as politically engaged and active citizens, or as disengaged adults. Youth is then the life stage during which individuals are first able to become aware of what different political parties stand for, and the issues that matter most to them. Some then begin...

This paper presents quantitative evidence from surveys of nationally representative samples of approximately 2000 15–29 year olds in each of four North Africa countries (Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia). The aim is to test whether the life cycle squeeze on leisure time, money and activities, recorded in successive Western investigations, operat...

This paper outlines how satellite television, the internet and cell phones have entered then spread within Saudi Arabia. We identify the short-term and discuss likely longer term outcomes in a country where, up to now, out-of-home leisure has been unusually restricted and which remains an absolute monarchy. Previous research into young people’s use...

This paper presents findings from surveys in 2015-16 among nationally representative samples of 15-29 year olds in five South and East Mediterranean countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Lebanon). The labour market careers of males and females, from different family class backgrounds, and with different educational attainments, in urban a...

The term 'waithood' has become increasingly used to describe the situations of 20-something males and females throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The suggestion is that, following a youth life stage, young adults' lives stall due to males' inability to obtain sufficiently stable and salaried employment to enable them to head new fam...

This paper argues that explanations must start at the end of young people’s education-to-work transitions, with employers’ recruitment behaviour and preferences, which then govern the content of and recruitment to preceding education and training. Young people themselves exercise agency: this propels their careers forward biographically, but necess...

This paper presents evidence from interviews in 2015–2016 with a nationally representative sample of Tunisia’s 15–29 year olds. We focus on the sample’s political participation and orientations during the revolution of 2011 and subsequently. We find that just 6.6 percent of those aged 15–24 at the time played any direct part in the ‘events of 2011’...

Abstract This paper presents evidence from interviews in 2015-16 with a nationally representative sample of Tunisia’s 15-29 year olds. We focus on the sample’s political participation and orientations during the revolution of 2011 and subsequently. We find that just 6.6 percent of those aged 15-24 at the time played any direct part in the ‘events o...

This chapter discusses how risks of various kinds have become normal parts of life in modern societies. It explains how at leisure young people not only encounter risks, but also often embrace them as sources of excitement in otherwise mundane lives.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess whether European sport has been damaged or adapted during the austerity in public sector and consumer spending that has followed the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Design/methodology/approach Review of literature and data. Findings Sport has adapted successfully. Research limitations/implications...

This paper presents evidence from interviews in 2015-16 with a nationally representative sample of Tunisia's 15-29 year olds. We use modernisation theory as a prism to examine the sample's political participation and orientations during the 'revolution' of 2011 and subsequently. We find that just 6.6 percent of those aged 15-24 at the time played a...

In 2010-11 young people in the South and East Mediterranean countries rose in protest against the authoritarian and corrupt governments in the region to demand democracy and social justice. What has changed in the transition from education to work for young men and women in the region? Are they still interested in politics and do they have a say in...

Abstract This paper uses official statistics and previous research by Saudi scholars, but mainly our own evidence from 23 interviews during 2015 and 2016 with 25-35 year old males and females, to explain why modernisation is Saudi Arabia, which includes the diversification of its economy and a huge expansion in higher education for males and female...

Writing is different than talking. The author needs a narrative. There has to be a start-point – a problem or question – then a body of evidence or argument, which leads to a conclusion. In other words, the writer needs a good story, and it now seems that throughout the history of leisure studies we have been searching for really good stories. Ther...

Our research develops an innovative way of measuring leisure participation. We use these measurements to address questions about leisure-effects derived mainly from Western leisure research. Does Western knowledge hold true among young people in Lebanon? This is a mainly Arab, coastal East Mediterranean country, sometimes referred to as the Levant,...

This paper has been prepared within the research project FP7-SSH-2013-2 SAHWA: empowering the young generation; towards a new social contract in South and East Mediterranean countries. ABSTRACT Our research develops an innovative way of measuring leisure participation. We use these measurements to address questions about leisure-effects derived mai...

This paper sets the 2011 uprisings (in all of which young people appeared to be strongly represented) in their country contexts: the ‘demographic surge’ throughout the region, which was being accompanied by youth migration into cities and increased enrolments in higher education, all amid job deficits in which higher education graduates had become...

This paper uses official statistics and previous research by Saudi scholars, but mainly our own evidence from 23 interviews during 2015 and 2016 with 25-35-year-old males and females, to explain why modernisation is Saudi Arabia, which includes the diversification of its economy and a huge expansion in higher education for males and females, is unl...

One view is that the post-communist countries are still in transition. This is the consensual view of Europe’s political elites who, in the early 1990s, decided that the outcome of the revolutions of 1989 and those that soon followed in the Soviet Union should be transitions into western-type market economies and democracies. In the early 1990s can...

These are amorphous, multicentered movements among young people who regard themselves, and are regarded by others, as an upcoming, usurping generation. Such movements are likely to form in periods of major historical change. This article discusses the main youth movements that have been formed during and since the midtwentieth century: the student...

This article reviews the topics that have been investigated, the research methods that have been employed, the main theoretical perspectives, agreed conclusions, and issues that remain unresolved since this subdiscipline was formed in the 1960s. We see that solid advances in knowledge have been accomplished through research into the relationships b...

This chapter explains how childhood foundations are typically laid for longer-term ‘careers’ as politically engaged and active citizens, or as disengaged adults. Youth is then the life stage during which individuals are first able to become aware of what different political parties stand for, and the issues that matter most to them. Some then begin...

Paper presented at British Sociological Association, Glasgow, April 15-17 2015

This paper challenges early interpretations of the Arab Spring as pro-democracy protests, led by young people who were frustrated by blocked life stage transitions. The evidence now available shows that life stage transitions were difficult for many but not blocked, that the protestors’ grievances were not age-related, and that their common motivat...

This paper uses political generations theory to examine the main youth mobilisations during and since the twentieth century: pre-1939 fascist and communist movements; the student movements of the 1960s and 70s; movements that challenged colonial and neo-colonial rulers in less developed countries and young people's involvement in the revolutions th...

Nowadays we are besieged with advice on how to live healthier, happier, more satisfying and more fulfilling lives. It has always been so but today there are many more experts — medical doctors, psychologists, sociologists, economists and therapists of various kinds as well as the bishops who have longer-standing claims to speak authoritatively. Tod...

This paper assembles time series data on leisure participation rates and expenditure to assess the impact of recessions in the UK during and since the 1980s, and the widening of social class disparities in income since then. It shows that in both cases there have been clear impacts on leisure spending, but to a lesser and variable extent on partici...

This article analyses the sport biographies, and current levels and patterns of participation among a sample of 1679 adults from six United Kingdom cities, of whom 1387 were initially contacted through user surveys at sports facilities, plus a more representative sample of 606 residents in inner-Belfast. The authors argue that lifetime patterns of...

The authors use evidence from their surveys of over 6000 users of 46 sports facilities in six different United Kingdom cities, and from longitudinal enquiries among over 1300 adult players plus control groups of non-participants, to interpret national trends, and to assess the achievements of the Sports Council's 20 year old campaign towards sport...

This article arises from surveys between 1987 and 1989 among representative samples of 16–20 year olds in Swindon and Liverpool. The young people in the former town ran the lower risk of unemployment, had the higher paying jobs and higher personal incomes on average, and, therefore, the higher levels of leisure spending. Overall, however, the young...

In 2011 England's career guidance profession lost its 'own' public service organisation and its former dedicated stream of public funding. The immediate causes lay in decisions by the government of the day, but this article revisits the profession's history to seek explanations for its later vulnerability. It is argued that decisions taken early in...

Based on quantitative data from the Norwegian Statistisk Sentralbyrå (Statistics Norway) study of Mosjon, Friluftsliv og Kulturaktiviteter, this paper explores trends in Norwegians' participation in sports, with a focus on young people. Norway boasts particularly high levels of sports participation as well as sports club membership and young Norweg...

The latest versions of modernisation theory claim that, since the end of communism and the globalisation of capitalism and the market economy, all countries have joined the same modernising trajectory. An implication is that, in those countries that have recently joined this trajectory, leisure forms and practices should be converging with those in...

This article argues that the post-war baby boomers led a long generation in which successive cohorts achieved, and came to expect, continuous improvement in living standards. The article proceeds to argue that current cohorts of young people in all Western countries will become the vanguard of a successor generation, distinguished by a different yo...

This paper examines how the leisure of young people in Western Europe has changed since the 1950s. It considers the effects of the extension of the youth life stage, the shift into a post-industrial era, and the steep increases in leisure spending that have occurred. The paper considers the ways in which youth cultures have now become milieu where...

The aim of this research was to establish whether there are class differences in the leisure patterns of university students in Southern Spain. Social class was operationalized using three indices that combined cultural and economic factors: family sociocultural status (FSCS), family economic level (FEL), and family socioeconomic status (FSES). The...

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...

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This paper is based on interviews with approximately 400 25–29 year old war refugees who were resident in Tbilisi (Georgia) and Yerevan (Armenia) in 2002. Comparisons are made with locally born samples from the same age group who had been reared in and who were still living in the relevant cities, and additional ‘disadvantaged’ samples from provinc...

This paper argues that by focusing on ‘little leisures’ (sport, tourism and so on, leisure that is serious or casual, or leisure that produces ‘flow’, or on the specifics of the leisure of selected socio‐demographic groups), leisure studies lose sight of the truly consequential outcomes from leisure. It is argued that explaining the ways in which l...