The Role of Private Space in Contemporary Youth Culture

Abstract

In the previous chapter, I examined in depth the research process undertaken to explore private and personal spaces such as bedrooms in a young person’s life-world. I considered the various issues and dilemmas in taking an ethnographic approach to research in this context, explaining how my methods were selected, how I created my research sample, and the ethical dilemmas I faced. One of the concerns I raised, as others such as Dickinson et al. (2001), Baker (2004) and Pink (2009) have done before me, was in relation to the suitability of ‘traditional’ and ‘holistic’ ethnographic approaches that are led by participant observation and interviewing and that strive for immersion and intensive participation on behalf of the researcher. In exploring contexts such as the personal and private domestic spaces of young people, such techniques are not necessarily the most suitable ones and, moreover, given the fragmented and fleeting cultural lifestyles of many young people, not always complementary to these. In this respect, I have argued that it is more insightful in such contexts to draw on a range of ethnographic methods, which in this study are drawn from traditional ethnography as well as from more contemporary sensory and visual approaches.