Conceptualizing Well-being in Youth: The Potential of Youth Clubs

Abstract

This study identifies key mechanisms in youth clubs for fostering well-being among vulnerable youths. We develop a framework to conceptualize prerequisites of well-being in youth, namely having a safe place to be, positive relations with others and possibilities for growth. This conceptualization maintains insights from psychological elements of well-being while bringing psychosocial theory of identity in youth into a sociological orientation. Understanding youth as a dynamic and situated phase expands the investigation of both well-being and youth clubs from merely revolving around ‘risk’ and ‘protection’. Based on interviews with youth workers and participants in youth clubs in Norway, the article describes how ‘hanging out’ in adult supervised but otherwise unstructured spaces provide youths with safety, belonging and a gradual sense of mastery. As such, the club may function as an institutionalized safe space and gives time, a ‘moratorium’, offering vulnerable youths shelter from adult responsibilities and the acceleration of societal demands.