What Makes Young People Connect With Society?
A social justice pilot program funds student research into how kids and youth interact with authority figures
Middle school was a tough time for Madison Tyler. “I was bullied and I didn’t really have a lot of support,” she says. “We didn’t have a school counselor.”
That experience has stayed with Tyler (CAS’21), a psychology and sociology double major. At the start of her senior year, she reached out to Max Greenberg, a sociology lecturer who studies the interplay of at-risk youth and state programs, to talk about social work graduate schools. He realized Tyler would be a perfect candidate to help him with an ongoing research project.
Greenberg, whose book Twelve Weeks to Change a Life: At-Risk Youth in a Fractured State was published in 2019, wants to understand how young people in low-income areas feel about those tasked with supporting them, from school teachers and counselors to police officers and church officials. And he’s looking for answers in a collection of interviews conducted by BU’s Center for Promise between 2011 and 2014 for a study about the role of community centers in cities.
I thought I’d graduate with my master’s and that I’d work in a school for the rest of my life. But now, maybe I want to do research.
With support from a pilot program, the Social Science Undergraduate Internships in Social Justice and Sustainability, Greenberg was able to hire Tyler to help him comb through the transcripts. The program is a product of a CAS task force that’s aiming to boost the college’s commitment to, and leadership in, the social sciences.
Tyler spent the year sifting through some of the 400-plus interviews, which had been conducted with young people, and their caregivers, from high-poverty neighborhoods in New Orleans, La., Durham, N.C., and Boston and Somerville, Mass. She flagged mentions of youth programs, churches, the criminal justice system, and violence, among other categories, and summarized the trends she saw emerging.
The stories the subjects told about their lives varied, but there were common themes. “There weren’t many references to neighborhood and school police officers, but there were a lot of references to violence, like shootings,” Tyler says. “A lot of kids said their neighborhoods were unsafe.” For some, that drove a desire to leave; for others, it inspired them to think of ways to fix the problem—often by suggesting more programs and activities.
“My hope is that this work might help policymakers think about the ways that the everyday experience of policies echo across a neighborhood and throughout a life,” says Greenberg, who is continuing his study and plans to publish the findings. “That a concern over violence can spill over into how a student thinks about forming close ties with supportive community members. Policies aren’t experienced in a vacuum. More concretely, we can see what drives young people to engage with support systems and bolster those things.”
Tyler’s involvement concluded in April, with a presentation at a research symposium alongside the program’s seven other interns, whose projects ranged from studying religious tolerance in China and Korea to examining how nature can foster well-being among women of color. Although her upbringing in suburban Massachusetts was different from those of the subjects in her study, Tyler says, their stories have resonated—particularly as she, too, was in middle school when the interviews were conducted, and experiences from those years shaped her life.
“I thought I’d graduate with my master’s and that I’d work in a school for the rest of my life,” says Tyler, who’s now studying social work at Boston College. “But now, maybe I want to do research. I’m really interested in the process and I really like looking at people’s stories.”