Qualitative Inquiry into the Everyday Experiences of Secondary School Students within Significant Spheres of their Lifeworld: Family, Friends and School – Narratives from Lahore

Abstract

Narratives of everyday experiences offer valuable insight into the social and material world that people inhabit. Exploratory research based on the voice of young people has the potential to offer insight into their lived realities. However, research based on first-hand accounts of young people from the Global South is often rare. Situated in the interdisciplinary field of Global South Youth Studies, this study aims to understand the everyday experiences of a few young people from Lahore. Focusing on young people in secondary schools, this exploratory qualitative inquiry is based on interviews with 19 girls and 15 boys, ranging in ages from 14 years to 18 years. Taking into account the contextual realities, this research includes a diverse set of students studying in a range of schools for Matric and GCSE. These schools vary in school ownership, fee, and location. Of these 34 total participants, 16 are studying for Matric and 18 are studying for GCSE. This research uses Schutz’s (1970) lifeworld for conceptualising the material and social world of everyday experiences. The lifeworld is spatiotemporal, includes a variety of social relations, and experiences occurring in this world of everyday life are informed by knowledge. This study discusses these interrelated features of the lifeworld by drawing on writings that discuss the Global South as a spatial-material context; the spheres of social relations of secondary school students; and the various meanings underpinning experiences as a result of cosmopolitanisation. These writings support the aim of this study: understanding the lifeworld of secondary school students in urban Lahore by focusing on their everyday experiences within the spheres of school, family and friends. Interviews with a diverse young people support this exploratory study in gaining insight into a variety of everyday experiences of use of spaces in school and experiences with teachers, school administration and peers. Additionally, this study offers insight into these young peoples’ living arrangements with their families and their everyday experiences with their parents, siblings, cousins, and grandparents. Together these accounts of experiences with spatial-material aspects and various social relations offer insight into the world of everyday life of these young people. Discussed through the intersectional themes of precarity, gender and identity construction, this research reflects on the knowledge that may underpin the world of everyday life of these young people in this context. This study argues that socioeconomic factors and gender inform subjective experiences of precarity. Concerns for socioeconomic success, illustrated through a focus on academic achievement, inform everyday experiences of use of time and of manging social expectations. While access to resources enables experiences of extracurricular engagement among students in high fee schools studying for GCSE, particularly for boys, precarity remains an ever-present reality for some as concerns for securing scholarships for elite international universities inform these experiences. The social construction of gender shapes peer relationships, friendships in the sphere of family, and other experiences of sharing information with parents and teachers. Girls in various schools, often irrespective of socioeconomic class, faced moral judgments in school, especially, at the hands of their teachers and school administration. These narratives of managing sociocultural expectations offer a poignant reminder of the way gender embeds participants lifeworld. Discussions of pursuing one’s interests, offering solidarity to peers, and managing sociocultural expectations of behaviour, often related to gender and age, illustrate the way these young people manage, resist, and redefine social and symbolic boundaries. This navigation of boundaries opens new conversations about identity construction in glocalising and cosmopolitanising contexts. This offers a holistic understanding of the expectations, desires, meanings, agencies, and constraints that these young people navigate. Together insights from this study contribute to a growing body of literature that aims to understand the world of everyday life of young people in empowering ways. In doing so, this study calls for understanding the factors that shape the world of everyday life of young people and the ways in which young people resist, (re)produce, and rework the boundaries that they encounter. Moreover, this study contributes to research focusing on secondary school students in Pakistan. In undertaking an exploratory approach, this study adds narratives of students, often rarely found in research focusing on this population and context. In doing so, this study highlights the need to listen to young people such that their needs may be accounted for and responded to, especially within the school and family spheres of lifeworld. Lastly, this study can inspire further lines of inquiry that focus on everyday experiences and lifeworld of young people, especially those in the Global South.