The field of youth studies appears to have increasingly taken on a self-consciously "international" orientation, characterized by grappling with how to represent local youth identities and social practices within international, transnational, or global contexts. This challenge is repeated across many different types of study and worked…

Over the past 40 years the fraction of mixed race black-white births has increased nearly nine-fold. There is little empirical evidence on how these children fare relative to their single-race counterparts. This paper describes basic facts about the plight of mixed race individuals during their adolescence and early adulthood. As one might expect,…

William McCready of the National Opinion Research Center discusses findings of his survey of American and Canadian Catholic youth (ages 14-30) on their attitudes toward religious vocations, membership in Catholic organizations, and their religious education. (Author/SJL)

To illustrate his claim that schools generally do a remarkably good job of schooling while the society makes inadequate use of other means to educate young people, the author presents a case history of a young American (identified pseudonymously as "Brad") whose schooling was adequate but whose education was not. Brad, jobless and…

College graduates face the contradictory and inconsistent beliefs of a society that seems to be struggling between a desire to either degrade or enhance the dignity of man. Amid all the current mechanical marvels there exists social ills of nightmare proportions. In the turmoil to find solutions to the many problems many have lost sight of the…

The presentation examines the challenge of advocacy for developmentally disabled people and their family members, and stresses the importance of a grass-roots basis for advocacy; it also describes the author's experiences as executive director of the Young Adult Institute, which operates community-based programs for mentally retarded and…

Youth today remains marginal to the primary institutions of American life. They no longer have opportunities within the family to develop skills, exercise responsibilities, or learn adult roles. Youths spend long periods of the day segregated in schools; longer periods in passive entertainment. Alienation results in political apathy, mental…

Writers across time have valued the use of fiction as a means of truth-telling. Fiction that portrays sexual minorities can lay claim to a place in the school curriculum for many of the same reasons that people include Shakespeare or Twain: they speak to the human experience in all its variety. But for those same reasons, fiction that speaks to…

Describes research that measured personal, national, and occupational identity among Jamaican postsecondary students. Observes that the variable of attitudes toward minorities was strongly related to personal and national identity, and suggests encouragement of positive attitudes toward ethnic groups in order to foster acceptance of differences in…