Conclusion

Abstract

Giving this book the title of Innovations in Youth Research always had the potential to make us hostages to fortune. We admit that it has been with some trepidation that we have used this title, as making claims to innovation is inevitably a rather perilous business (Travers, 2009; Taylor and Coffey, 2008). What might be innovative to one person, or within one particular field of study, might well be old hat to another person or within another field of enquiry. For this reason we have chosen to conceive of innovation for the purposes of this book in terms of research methods and approaches that have not yet filtered through to the mainstream within youth research, if by ‘mainstream’ we mean a dominant tendency. So the specific methods written about in this book are, for the most part, not completely new (although the contexts in which they are applied might be), but neither, for the most part, are they yet widespread. Many of these methods are, though becoming increasingly popular within youth studies, particularly among younger generations of researchers, and in our view deserve a wider audience. This is particularly so in relation to the growing popularity of visual, online and mobile methods, approaches which have featured in many chapters in this book. Importantly, they testify to a current wave of methodological creativity within the field of youth research, partly a response to the possibilities afforded by new technologies, as well as to the growing popularity of participatory and mixed methods approaches which have encouraged researchers to think more imaginatively about issues of research design.