ESRC End of Award Research Report Title: Consuming identities:
Young people, cultural forms and negotiations in households
Current concerns about young people’s consumption centre on
young people’s increased propensity for buying goods, their
susceptibility to advertising and their ‘pester power’ over
their parents. Research has found that young people define
themselves, at least partly, by the messages they give to others
through the goods they possess and display. Goods are consumed
as much for what they signify as for their basic use-value --
hence the importance of brand names and 'designer' labels to
many young people (Kenway and Bullen, 2001). However, research
on young people and consumption is not new. Since the 1950s,
researchers have examined the construction of young people as a
distinctive market of ‘teenage consumers’, and the increasingly
significant and complex role that consumption plays in the
constitution of youth identities (e.g. Abrams, 1959). While
consumption is important as a marker of