Born in Britain: The lost generation - A study of young black people in Croydon, the children of immigrants from the Caribbean

Abstract

This study is in two parts, separate and distinctive, yet interconnected. It is concerned with black young people, bom in Croydon, whose parents and grandparents were born in the Caribbean or who were socialised as Caribbeans. It seeks to generate a theory of how being black and bom in Britain creates intergenerational tensions which transcend those of "normal" adolescent relationships and how this affects their membership of 'main-stream' society.

Part A, is an Institution Focused Study which examines the efficacy of the grounded theory approach as a suitable methodology for an ethnographic study of British-born black young people, necessitating in-depth interviewing both of the young people themselves and adults of their parents' and grandparents' generations.

The Institution Focused Study explains the background to the research including the interest of the researcher in this topic. It charts the conditions which black young people face in a white-dominated and inherently racist society and highlights the paucity of research on this issue. It examines the grounded theory approach, suggesting that its suitability arises from its similarity to the youth work practitioner's style of operation and devises an appropriate research design to ensure that sufficient subjects are recruited and interviewed to provide information-rich data to be collected and analysed.

It concludes that this method, when applied with scientific rigour, will produce sufficient data to enable both substantive theories and a more formal theory of British-born black young people to be generated.

Part B constitutes the main study. After a brief introduction a discussion on Adolescence is provided to contextualise the study in view of the varying and rapid changes occurring in this period of human development. The study returns to the question of the research design and considers how information-rich data is to be gathered, and how subjects will be recruited and interviewed for which It provides an interviewer prompt sheet.

An analysis of the data is then offered, grouped into the categories which have emerged and been developed as the study unfurled. Discussion then centres around the subjects 'own stories' together with other theories and research. The findings are summarised leading to a number of substantive theories which then are synthesised into a formal theory of British-born black young people. This suggests that they suffer a sense of cultural anomie denying them a necessary, new and distinctive identity as emerging black British citizens.

The study raises the implications of this for the future work of the Croydon Youth Development Trust before offering a foot-note on methodology; a reflection on the grounded theory approach and its suitability to this type of ethnographic research.