Localising young people’s health: implications for public health policy and practice

This paper describes a qualitative research project, ‘Localising Health: Space, class and gender and the lives of young people’. This qualitative, ethnographic study was undertaken with 25 young people from diverse socio-economic households who resided in Lyttelton, 2000-2005 and illustrated the complex intersections of locality, class, gender and social networks in the constructions of their identities and health related practices. It considered young people’s health in a broad perspective, how it is experienced and lived out at a practical level. By focusing on locality, this research highlights how health related practices are interpreted by young people in the context of cultural norms and practices within their social networks. Understanding how locality and social context shapes young peoples attitudes to and participation in health related behaviours has relevance for public health policy and practice. I will discuss how public health needs to strive for better understandings of young people’s diverse cultures and meanings of health related behaviours within contextualized settings in order to develop more effective health promotion strategies. A challenge for public health is to incorporate more sophisticated analyses of young people’s health, and to address the diversity of young people’s health as complex, multifaceted, social and cultura