Social Communities in Transitions: Young Danes’ Narratives on the Change and Maintenance of Social Communities

Methodology and Research Design

Given our interest in the meanings that young people ascribe to their social communities, ‘social community’ as a concept was not predefined by the researchers before our interviews. Instead, it was co-developed with the young respondents during the interviews. In this way, the interviews were designed to allow conceptualizations of communities and their functions and importance to evolve from the young people’s narratives based on their dialogue with the researchers (Bruselius-Jensen & Sørensen, 2017). Referring to Anderson (2006), we conceive of communities as ‘imagined communities’ that come into being through experiences and identification processes. By extension, social communities are not established and confirmed once and for all, but emerge via regular conversations and narratives. The interviews thus provided an opportunity for the young participants, in dialogue with the researchers, to establish their subjective views on what social communities mean to them, how they use communities and their significance.

Fællesskab (the Danish term for social community, used during the interviews) is a very broad concept which includes everything from communities viewed as the social cohesion which functions at the macro societal level, as defined for example, by Taylor (1989), to more micro-level networks of communities in which small groups of individuals engage in affect-laden relationships as defined by Etzioni (1994). The combination of the individual and thus person-centred interview form and the young people’s conceptualizations of communities resulted in a strong emphasis on social communities at the micro-level, while notions of belonging to more macro-level communities, based on for example, class, religion, ethnicity, or nationality, were less apparent. Consequently, the narratives presented in the analysis will focus less on these macro level communities and more on the young people’s perceptions of the micro-communities that constitute an integral part of their daily activities and how these communities change over the course of different transition processes, for example, leaving the parental home, moving to a new city and starting new study programmes. Through the young people’s narratives, we can have a glance at how young people in different life stages understand and experience these communities.

The article is based on in-depth interviews with 12 young people who live in the same medium-sized Danish town. The town is characterized by a diverse population and (for Denmark) relatively average opportunities for youth education and leisure activities. The first respondents were recruited through personal networks and postings on Facebook, while subsequent respondents were recruited through the snowball sampling method. The first respondents referred to potential new respondents and so forth. Many young people showed an interest in participating in the study, but we selected respondents to represent an equal distribution across gender, age, and life stage. The distribution across life stages allows an insight into how the perceptions and functions of social communities may change over the course of young people’s transition processes.

Four respondents were aged 15–19, four were 20–24 and four were 25–30. There were seven girls and five boys, with more boys in the intermediate age group and more girls in the oldest age group. Three respondents had at least one parent of non-Danish—albeit Western—background. Four of the respondents were living at home and eight had already left home. Four were enrolled in youth education programmes, two were in higher education and two were in vocational training, while four were working. We wanted to recruit average Danish young people and did not include anyone who was particularly marginalized or privileged in terms of finances, education, or wellbeing. The study thereby represents an average group of young people, with the town functioning as a typical case of an average community (Patton, 1990).

During the interviews, we paid particular attention to identifying the participants’ own experiences and understandings of social communities. Based on the question ‘Which social communities are important to you in your everyday life?’, we asked the participants to talk about what these communities consisted of, what the communities were centred around, what the communities meant to them, and what their own impact was on these communities. In addition, we asked for comparisons between the social communities in order to be able to identify patterns and variations across different types of community. We also asked about the significance the communities had assumed over the course of the participants’ lives, partly to understand the impact of transitions on the way young people ascribe meaning to their communities.

Based on the assumption that young people see themselves as being a part of many different social communities, all of the communities mentioned were listed on sticky notes by the interviewer. These were laid out on a table and served as an overview and frame of reference for both the participants and the interviewer during the interview. In line with the findings of Bagnoli (2009), the notes were found to function differently in different interviews. Some participants used them actively during the entire interview, arranging them in rows to illustrate how they were connected, grouping them according to importance, and so forth. In other interviews, the notes played a less prominent role. For all participants, the notes eventually formed a map of their significant communities and how they had changed over time. The interviews were characterized by very personal and often sensitive narratives about the social lives of young people. Working with sticky notes had positive side effects: The participants found that the map created by the notes gave them a much-appreciated overview of how their social life was structured, or as one respondent said ‘a check-up on my social life’. The notes also sometimes provided an opportunity to talk about sensitive topics without making eye contact with the interviewer, since the individual’s focus could be kept on the notes.

The participants chose the setting for the interviews, which were then carried out either at their homes, in a meeting room at a public library, or outside. The interviews lasted between 40 and 70 min. All interviews were recorded and subsequently transcribed. The respondents consented to their statements being used in the research project and published in anonymized form. No one availed themselves of their right to withdraw any of their data. The completed analysis was sent to all the participants.

The analysis was performed as a content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) with several layers. The first reading of the 12 individual interviews identified arenas in which the communities were based (family, institutional, and leisure communities) as key thematic elements. Second reading was directed by transitional theory in order to identify transitional movements across the three areas. The final reading identified and clustered expressions used by young people to talk about the changes in social communities due to transitions. Accordingly, the quotes both represent our individual young participants’ and our analyses of the entire dataset. When quotes are presented, the participants’ age is stated in parentheses.

Family, It’s Like the Entire Structure and Everything Else is Built around it

Youth is often understood as a phase of life in which young people become more independent of their families and begin to forge their own life course. Moving away from the family home is one of the most decisive transitions in youth (Holsworth & Morgan, 2005; Jones & Wallace, 1992; Mulder, 2009). In our study, the family appeared as an essential community to all 12 of the young participants, although there were considerable differences in how the participants still living at home and those who had moved out talked about their families in the interviews. It generally took a long time for those who still lived at home to mention the family as a community in the interviews, and sometimes they only did so at the request of the interviewer. Moreover, not all of them prioritized spending time with their family, but rather primarily socialized with their families as part of their everyday routines when they were at home. Magnus (20) talked about his family in the following way:

Interviewer: What about the family? How significant is it?

Magnus: It is important when we have to eat, and when we are going on holiday. It is not because we do that much….

Interviewer: But it’s there anyway?

Magnus: It’s there, you could say. So, I of course talk with all of them. And I love them and all that. But we don’t mean much to each other’s everyday lives.

Although Magnus and the other participants who still lived at home seemed to take their families for granted to the extent that they forgot to mention them in the interviews, there was no doubt that they were considered essential communities, which became apparent when they were encouraged to talk about them by the interviewer. Daniel (20), who was in the process of completing his upper secondary education and was about to leave home, seen it as follows:

Daniel: You have the background at home with the family, right? So it’s a bit, the entire structure of it, where everything else is just the facade and … built around it. But it’s limited how much you get to see them, when you leave at seven in the morning and come home at ten in the evening.

Daniel portrays his family as the backbone of his everyday life, even though he does not see much of them on a daily basis. This view of the family as a community that is just there, but still provides a secure foundation in young people’s lives, is also prevalent in Turtiainen et al. (2007) study of Finnish families. Here the authors demonstrate that, even though a large part of the relationship to the family for young people living at home is routine, the family as a community is maintained through these everyday routines, which gives them great significance. This is supported by a study by Thomsen (2016), in which 90 per cent of young Danes aged between 15 and 20 responded that their relationship with their family is of decisive importance to their wellbeing. In our study, this portrayal of the family as an essential community was repeated by all 12 youths of both genders, and it was not affected by the fact that six of them came from families in which the parents had separated. This perception of the family community comes close to what Tönnies and Loomis (2017) defined as ‘gemeinshaft’: a close-knit community, to which you belong without having to prove yourself or negotiate your belonging. The perception of having this kind of community appeared as an essential backbone of stability and security in an otherwise rapidly shifting social life.

However, those who had left home no longer portrayed the family as a routine part of everyday life that was more or less taken for granted. Instead they spoke of the family as a community that had to be actively maintained, developed, and prioritized. These young people talked about regular phone calls, the coordination of shared dinners, vacations and other activities, and some of them also mentioned actively choosing to live near their parents to enable them to frequently engage in family activities. Anna (29) was one of the young people in the study for whom family was of crucial importance:

Anna: Yes, well, both my mum and dad come over several times a week, at least to pick up the children once a week and eat with us and … Well, we were just out by my mom and dad today, just to say hi and then they drove out and looked at a property we have been looking at in connection with, if we were to buy a house and … well, just like this.

Such accounts of the family resemble the young people’s narratives about their closest friends. In these narratives, they talked about close communities where one often talks, discusses, and debates all kinds of things, goes on holiday together, looks forward to the next shared experience, and so forth. However, even though they talked about their families as a solid base that they could not imagine living without, once they had left home, the relationship with the family appears to have been transformed, from something mundane and taken for granted to something that they were obliged to actively maintain using shared activities and frequent communication.

Thus moving away from home was not described as a break with or separation or liberation from the family. On the contrary, the study participants emphasized their continued dependence on their family communities and their need to maintain them. This is in line with research on changes in the notion of parenthood, which involve a growing emphasis on parents’ involvement in the lives of their young children, even after they have left home (Sørensen & Nielsen, 2020). The move from the parental home is thus not described as a linear, step by step transition along an inevitable path towards independence from one’s parents (Woodman & Leccardi, 2015a,b). Today’s parents are increasingly expected to be intertwined in the practical and emotional lives of their children, resulting in new forms of interwovenness between young people who have moved away from home and their families. In the young people’s narratives in our study, the family was transformed from an essential community that was taken for granted into an essential community that demanded considerable work and maintenance.

It Was A New Start, So I Attached Myself to My Peers in the New Class

The daily lives of young people in Denmark are lived to a great extent in institutional contexts, not least educational institutions, which make up a particularly important arena for young people’s communities (Katznelson, Sørensen, & Illeris, 2018). It is therefore not surprising that the majority of the communities mentioned by the participants in our study emerged from educational institutions. As transitioning from one form of education to another is an inherent part of most young people’s lives, the construction and maintenance of friendships and communities in connection with these transitions were described repeatedly in all the young people’s narratives. In this regard, the study participants spoke of continuously having to leave institutional communities, build new ones, and maintain those they had already left.

The young people were often slow to mention the communities in their current educational institutions, even though they spent many of their everyday lives in these institutions. Being part of an educational institution was largely perceived as a mandatory part of being young, and like their family communities, the communities in their current educational institutions appeared to be so self-evident that they hardly thought to mention them to begin with. However, in contrast to how they talked about their families prior to leaving home, the young people often spoke of their current educational communities as something that demanded continuous hard work. Although they, on the one hand, took these communities for granted, they paradoxically talked a lot about the time and energy that they had to put into them. This was particularly true for the study participants who had recently switched to a new educational institution. Peter (17) talked about starting in a new upper secondary school class:

Peter: You know, my class is quite new. We were just placed together. But groups quickly took shape and stuff. I’m not a big fan of this. It was also a bit difficult for me at the beginning, I would say {laughs}. But I feel like I make an effort in all the communities that I’m a part of. And I do my best to make everyone happy.

Communities in school seemed to cause a great deal of difficulty, but since being in school was considered mandatory, these communities were also perceived as important, and Peter seemed to put a lot of effort into making them work. While Peter talked about his efforts, Christina (17) spoke about the effort everyone in her upper secondary class had to put into strengthening the social cohesion of the class:

Christina: We had a really, really, bad sense of community until we started doing some stuff together, where we now help each other. We have become so close. Now we also want to do things together after school and always help each other. And this community means a lot. And you need to have the class community because you also need help and support along the way.

Christina’s narrative is a testament to the importance of community in the classroom. If there is no sense of community, then an effort must be made to create it. This notion is underlined by the fact that Christina changed school because her class in her previous school ‘did not work socially’. The way Christina talked about the educational community in many ways resembled Daniel’s perception of the family as scaffolding: You need a class community to make it through education. But whereas the family as scaffolding in Daniel’s narrative came easily, the educational community in Christina’s narrative demanded hard work.

Alexander (22), who was bit older than Peter and Christina, had left his hometown to start higher education. From the start he was keen on building communities in his new educational context:

Alexander: Yes, so I moved to (new town) because of it. So, it was like a new start and I therefore also attached myself to my peers in the class I was in. And I hung out with them and was with them a lot…. Now I have been with them for three years, so now I know them really, really well.

Although Alexander was still in touch with most of the communities from his hometown, he worked hard to establish new communities in the teacher study programme that he had moved town in order to enrol in. In all the young people’s narratives, having well-functioning communities in their educational contexts appeared to be essential, something they could not just opt-out of. But in contrast to the young people’s narratives about their families before leaving home, they talked about the communities in their current educational contexts as rather demanding. And the work continued beyond the classroom and the social activities with their fellow students, as the educational communities were continuously maintained on social media. They seemed to be constantly present in the young people’s everyday lives, as they chatted, used FaceTime and checked messages from the school system, something that has also been stressed in much other recent research (e.g., Awan & Gauntlett, 2013).

The study also showed that the young people did not leave the educational communities when they left the educational institutions that these communities were originally a part of. Rather, they strived to maintain them. The maintenance of communities from former educational contexts was a prevalent theme in all the participants’ narratives. The prioritization of these communities during transitions between forms of education, internships, and jobs was not least obvious among the oldest informants, whose maps of communities showed pathways through a wide range of institutionally related communities. Most respondents had accumulated several communities from former institutional contexts, such as primary school, secondary school, national service, and boarding school communities. As a consequence, the oldest respondents talked a lot about their attempts to maintain their communities from previous institutional contexts.

Lisa (29), who had recently completed her university study programme, said she had started losing contact with her former classmates after their graduation, but that they were trying to find a way to continue seeing each other. Sarah (30), who finished her study programme several years ago, was similarly trying to work out a way to maintain a community with her study-related friends:

Sarah: But … these secondary school people, they have … we have just stuck together. And we have for some years – six years ago or something like that – where we actually decided that now… we would like to hold on to each other. We set up this group, where we, like, every third month, had two or three of us planning something that was a surprise for the others. And it could be anything.… So, on this day, we are together. We know that we may not have the time during our daily lives.

This example represents a rather successful effort at maintaining a community. Sarah’s group of friends met up every third month following a kind of schedule with regard to frequency and form. But Sarah’s example also underlines the perceived importance and the work demanded to maintain these communities. Young people’s efforts to maintain friendships through their educational transitions were also reported in Brooks’ (2002) longitudinal study, which concluded that young people prioritize the maintenance of their friendships when they move in connection with higher education, with a majority of them having both friendships in their study programme and friendships from prior educational contexts and neighbourhoods.

Many of the narratives on maintaining communities that are no longer an integral part of the participants’ everyday lives indicate that this maintenance involves frequent communication on various social media platforms. Digital media thus further enable young people to accumulate multiple communities and keep them active through all the transitions of youth. However, as Woodman and Leccardi (2015a,b) emphasize, not all young people succeed in maintaining their communities during the multiple transitions of their young lives. Maya (17), for example, had experienced many shifts and changes between various primary and secondary school classes and therefore already had a rich experience of transitioning between educational contexts and communities. But Maya found it difficult to socialize with larger groups, and she had learned that having only one or two close friends in a class worked better for her. Maya’s communities were therefore built around a few friends from her current institutional context and a few friends form former educational contexts with whom she still occasionally kept in contact.

Silje (23) also maintained only a few friendships from her different education programmes. In the interview, she explained that the communities in which she participated in a study programme or other institutional contexts often ended up being temporary. They may have been good and strong when they constituted an active part of her everyday life, but when she did not participate in them on a daily basis, they slowly disappeared:

Silje: Just like you can see when I’ve been on an internship – then it is out of my life. And then I know that, when I start back at school again, it is my classes which start to be important … And when I’m done there, they will also be out of my life. They don’t become a part of anything. I live very much in the here and now.

Silje thus had no expectations that her study programme community would be significant for her in the future. At the same time, however, Silje expressed concern that she might not have enough communities or even that she might be lonely. She was aware that she rarely maintained her communities through her educational transitions, and this worried her. However, just like Maya, she explained this lack of retention of communities as being related to her personality and to her living ‘very much in the here and now’.

These narratives show that institutional communities, like the family, were perceived as essential to the young people but that, in contrast to the family, even communities from current institutional contexts demanded a great deal of focus and work. When the young people moved to new institutional contexts, their existing communities were transformed from taken-for-granted, but also work-demanding, communities into more optional communities, which could be deselected to a greater extent. However, most of the young people attempted to maintain almost all of their communities and perceived most of them as being essential despite being work demanding. Others considered it difficult to maintain even a few close friendships and found that even though they still perceived them as desirable, most institutional communities disappeared during their educational transitions.

In My Dream Community,  All My Friends Would be on the Same Football Team

Being part of communities associated with leisure activities was also a central theme in the narratives. Denmark has a strong tradition of voluntary organized leisure activities (Ibsen & Seippel, 2010). More than 80 per cent of young Danes are members of a voluntary association at some point in their childhood or youth. Social communities related to participation in various association-based leisure activities thus play an important role in the childhood of the vast majority of Danes. In adolescence, young people’s leisure communities are also subject to many changes, which were also described in the narratives in our study.

All the study participants had personal experience of association-based leisure communities. These communities were the first to be mentioned by several of the youngest respondents. This indicates both that leisure communities are the type of communities that young people most immediately associate with the concept of communities, and that they have a special status—not least that they are considered communities which the young people have themselves chosen to be a part of to a greater extent. These communities were not a taken-for-granted part of their everyday lives in the same way as families and, to some extent, institutional communities.

Some of the youngest respondents talked about taking part in leisure communities as simply doing an activity together with others. The activity in itself seemed to constitute the community without much individual effort. Peter (17) explained:

So, we don’t have like, you know ‘guys hanging out in the locker room’. You go to the field, you play ball together and then you leave. All the other stuff comes later on I think.

The soccer community was central to Peter and was the first community he mentioned in the interview, but it was the activity, actually playing soccer, that was the organizing factor for the community, and Peter did not perceive this community as being particularly demanding for him. This perception mirrored how Christina (17) talked about her community in the Social Democratic Party. Her participation in the party was centred around meeting and voicing her opinions and being listened to, but she did not have much interest in the party as such. It was the activity of debating and having opinions that seemed to constitute the community that she experienced in the party.

These rather casual relations to the contexts of the communities, for example, the associations, and the emphasis on their activities, might explain why several of the respondents found it less important to maintain their leisure communities once they had given up playing soccer, being scouts and attending choir. Alexander (23) and Simon (22) both stopped playing soccer because they found it became too competitive and took too much time and effort. As Simon (23) said:

Simon: So, I stopped. Simply because… It was something about me considering going down a professional path… a serious path. But I chose to say no. Soccer became too serious for me, because there used to be a sense of community – that was what I liked.

Simon chose to quit soccer when it became too competitive, and he missed the fun part of it. This is in line with Pless et al. (2015), who demonstrate that young people who continue sports at an age when people usually leave school are particularly ambitious, whereas many tend to drop out of their sports associations at this point. Likewise, when asked, most of the participants in our study could mention a number of leisure communities that they had left during adolescence. While the study participants gave many examples of how they worked to maintain family communities (after they had moved away from home) and institution-based communities (after they had changed institutional context), they rarely mentioned maintaining leisure communities after they had stopped being a member of the association in question. Sarah (30), for example, who gave a high priority to maintaining communities from both previous educational contexts and jobs, did not prioritize the maintenance of communities from associations that she used to be part of. Sarah was not alone. The young people in our study rarely expressed the same obligation to work on and maintain self-selected leisure communities when they left them, as they did with family and institutional communities.

On the other hand, the narratives also show that, for those who chose to maintain and prioritize them, leisure communities could play a significant role in their everyday lives and identities. The older respondents who were still part of leisure communities when interviewed had all been through a transition in their formal roles within these communities. Simon (22) was involved in an independent Christian church and the church community and his role in the community had changed from participation in activities to becoming the leader of the church’s youth section. Magnus (19) had moved from playing football to become the playing coach on his team and the organizer of the team’s social meet-ups before and after training and games. Daniel (20) had been a swimmer all his life, but following a shoulder injury had started working as a coach:

I’ve been there now for 10–11 years and have … have achieved a lot as a swimmer and hope to achieve even more as a coach. So, you know many other people through this. The swimming world is really important to me.

Daniel not only talked about the transition from a focus on the activity of swimming to taking on a more central and organizing role in the community, but he also demonstrated how leisure communities can be transformed into something of essential importance when young people choose to stay and take on more work-demanding roles in the associations of which they are part. Participation in associations thus seemed not only to be a focal point of some young people’s everyday lives and social lives but was also of major importance for their perception of themselves.

Unlike family and institutional communities, leisure communities may be associated with a higher degree of individual choice. Although a majority of young Danes are part of an association at some point, they are not born into them or mandatory members. Association-based leisure communities are something that the participants themselves choose to be part of and prioritize in their everyday lives. While the activities initially serve an organizing function in their lives, without much effort from the young people involved, as they become older many of them opt out of the associations and do not seem to wish to continue to maintain these communities, while others become much more dedicated to the community and engage in the organization and maintenance of the association. Some even see the associations as possible future workplaces. For these young people, the leisure communities are transformed from taken-for-granted side effects of their leisure activities to essential and work-demanding communities that they are willing to prioritize and put a lot of work into.