Betydningen av vennskap og sosiale relasjoner som ung

Abstract

This article examines the significance of friendship and social relations in young people`s lives. This is illuminated through two young women with low socioeconomic backgrounds, and their experiences from being children, youth and young adults. The article is written within the MaCE project, which is a cooperation between Norway, England and Denmark. We have used a qualitative, unstructured interview, called the indirect approach to interact with the youth. The goal of using this method is to gain insight into the informant's secret world by obtaining information without asking directly for it. Furthermore, we have approached these young women`s stories through a thematically analysis. The stories show that the informants` experiences with friendship or lack of it have great importance. A recurrent element is how the informants struggled to understand the social codes and often chose to be alone in order to avoid a possible rejection. This seems to result in a negative pattern, which seems to be hard to break out of. In addition, the informants often talk about the lack of friendship and social relations in the context of their feeling of loneliness and mental struggles. This is illustrated by Bourdieu's theory of social and cultural capital, as well as Søndergaard's theory of social exclusion.