Young People’s Everyday Experiences of Poverty – descriptive thematic analysis
Keywords:
poverty, experience, young people, qualitative researchAbstract
There has been much less qualitative research done on the topic of youth poverty compared to quantitative research. Qualitative poverty research has previously focused more on the experiences of adults rather than young people. In this article, we examine the poverty experienced by young people based on their own writings. We examine how young people experience poverty in Finland.
The research material, called Young People’s Everyday Experiences of Poverty, was collected in the fall of 2022. Young people aged 15-21 describe in their writings (n=84), how they experience poverty in their everyday life and the situations where poverty is experienced. The data was analyzed with computer-assisted (Nvivo) systematic thematic analysis and a quantitative analysis.
Young people’s poverty experiences manifests in everyday life as a lack of basic necessities, fragile social relationships and strong negative emotions. Young people had many difficulties to afford food, medicine, electricity, heating and gasoline due to high prices and inflation. Young people felt alienated from their peers, kept their poverty as a secret, experienced loneliness and shame, and compared their own situation to other peers. Young people associated feelings of stress, anxiety, fear, anger and sadness with the experience of poverty.
Our research shows that relative poverty is particularly harmful to young people, as it leads to lack of basic needs, a feeling of otherness in social relationships, and strain on their mental health. Young people's experience of poverty also includes a strong sense of distance from societal good and ordinary everyday life in Finland.
