Introduction

Recent studies of youth in the field of Brazilian education have moved beyond the narrow associations of this life stage with denial of responsibilities, violence, and consumption. The national literature on this subject has shown that while, on one hand, young Brazilians are often forced to enter the labor market at an early age, on the other, the chronological vision, marked by distinct stages and which imputes to young people a so-called social moratorium, must also consider other dimensions of youth, such as the importance of the peer group and sociability, use of time, circulation throughout the city, styles, cultural creation, and political engagement.

Along with careful choices when formulating questions at the beginning of the research process or when selecting theoretical approaches, processes for producing new knowledge must also take into account the characteristics of the subjects chosen as interlocutors. Once the research problem is defined, the research object is restricted to data collection based not only on theoretical-methodological questions, but also on the empirical limits established by the chosen population. (Giraud, 2011).¹

Indeed, structural factors derived from social positions, gender relations, and ethnic-racial relations, among others, impose on the researcher the responsibility of remaining attentive and reflective in contacts with the research subjects. In addition to controlling preconceptions arising from the researcher’s own background—so-called epistemological vigilance (Bourdieu, Chamboredon, & Passeron, 2004)—researchers must carefully evaluate their methods when their project directly affects the lives of the individuals or groups under investigation.

The different life moments included in the category of youth (e.g., adolescence) along with aspects of cultural diversity and social inequality demand that we consider the plurality of youth experience. Therefore, with regard to research on young people in their most varied forms of life and expressions, particularly in adolescence, it is important to take into account that this stage of life is not only generally characterized by a search for autonomy but also by attempts to build lives that reflect the individual’s decisions and values (De Singly, 2004).

Research projects that examine young people should recognize the specificities that can be translated into analyses of the diversity and inequalities of youth experience. Aside from the demographic delimitations on youth, there is also a set of cultural representations and models to consider. Two aspects are key to keep in mind: Markers of age can inform early approaches, since there is international agreement on the general extent of this stage of life (from 15 to 29 years of age); however, besides the diversities and inequalities inherent to this broad categorization—which led Bourdieu (1983) to affirm that “youth is just a word”—significant differences exist among young people. Adolescents, for example, exhibit behaviors, expectations, and interactions that are very different from those of young adults making the difficult transition to adulthood.

Thus, in studies of youth experiences marked by diversity and inequality (Abramovay, Andrade, & Esteves, 2007), research questions and theoretical frameworks remain extremely relevant; however, one must also take into account the specific characteristics of the subjects being surveyed. Rather than presenting a balance of research in the field of education or the so-called sociology of youth, this article identifies possible approaches to this subject based on studies that have already been carried out, recognizing the importance of intellectual craftsmanship and sociological imagination (Mills, 1965) on matters ranging from the establishment of research questions to methodology.

With regard to researching young people in their varied forms of lifestyles and expressions, it is important to take into account that in this stage of seeking autonomy, valuing peer groups, and distrusting institutions, the circumstances under which the researcher establishes contact with the subject can produce both challenges and opportunities in adequately collecting data.

Of course, as Howard S. Becker has pointed out in his methodological work, although the issue of insertion is not scientifically dealt with by methodological considerations, it is a problem that presents itself to all who conduct research in the field: how to “get permission to study what one wants to study, to have access to the people that one wants to observe, to interview or to give questionnaires” (Becker, 1992, p. 34).

In undertaking research with young people, the researcher may often find it difficult to establish an effective interaction with the respondents, who may adopt a posture of distrust, aversion, or even simply perform a “masquerade game” that produces only cursory information. As sociologists Dubet and Martuccelli (1996) have concluded from research on the life of students of the French collège, “dissimulation is the heart of adolescent sociability” (p. 164).

Research projects carried out since the late 1990s on young people in Brazil, their lifestyles, challenges, and relations with education, have employed strategies allowing for concrete answers to their respective questions. In order to accomplish this goal, they used a mixture of techniques that would enable them to approximate the ways of life of young people.

Some researchers have embraced the technique of bricolage, in the sense associated with French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (2009), to deal with the challenges posed by the specificities of researching young people, as illustrated by examples throughout this article. This approach holds that the choice of research methods depends on the questions initially asked, the latter being directly related to the context at hand (Nelson, Treichler, & Grossberg, 1992).

By actively engaging in the research process, deploying a variety of approaches, bricolage is best understood as “the process of employing these methodological strategies as needed in the circumstances of the research” (Kincheloe, 2007, p. 15).

The research on young people presented in this article, therefore, used creative ways to address these issues and fills some of the gaps Becker (1992) identified when commenting on leading studies, which paid relatively little attention to the need for inventiveness and for blending various research methods in a single project. This approach can help researchers answer their questions about young people and their life experiences without falling into trite answers or different types of reductions or reifications.

Brief Discussion of Research Spaces and Context

There are no spaces that are necessarily privileged or interdicted for conducting research with young people. While schools and universities may be prime locations for collecting data on diverse subjects, many times the research experience may become richer if the research locus moves beyond the school, which may be considered a non-scholastic perspective in the sociological study of the school. That is, the school as an analytical category can be investigated from diverse empirical realities, including in these educational institutions (Sposito, 2003). Students, of course, do not always see school as a place of free expression, especially in the moments before university life.

Collecting data necessarily involves preliminary reflection and exploratory work to verify research conditions. With regard to student access—for interviews, discussion groups, focus groups, and for administering questionnaires—a preparatory insertion is needed in addition to the agreement from institutional administrators and those being investigated. Even if the aim is not to carry out long-term observations typical of ethnographic projects, observation and knowledge of the environment are important factors in determining subsequent choices. It is not only the topic and the subjects that define the space of research. Elements that could be considered contextual are also decisive. Examples arising from difficult research topics such as school violence or sexuality and gender can illustrate these arguments well.

One example concerns a study carried out with students at a public high school which raised some difficult questions from the outset. One of the researchers was also a teacher at the school, and since the project was an individual initiative linked to his graduate studies, he acknowledged that his status of researcher-teacher and his relationships with students, in that context, would make it difficult to interview the young people at hand. While the first decision involved moving away from the school to another location in order to carry out the research, the students’ acceptance of the researcher’s role was facilitated by previous contact. The project concerned a mobilized school plan offering an open climate for the participation of students, teachers, and parents. Assemblies, meetings, and demonstrations involved in the struggle to reform the building were frequently observed. But, in a contradictory way, the school suffered from acts of vandalism and aggression carried out by groups of students hostile to any action by teachers and the administration. In the course of the research, these violent episodes culminated in the compulsory transfer of one of them. Despite the previous knowledge of immersion in the school environment for a prolonged period, the interview with the student was only carried out when he left school and agreed to meet the researcher outside the school (Garcia, 1995).

In a study of female homosexuality among high school adolescents, Cavaleiro (2009) chose the school environment to conduct a case study after an exploratory survey with informants that allowed for a better understanding of the context. This was a particularly open school that embraced innovative projects, creating spaces for students to interact beyond the classroom. In a preliminary conversation with a member of the school’s technical staff, the story of a “special commendation,” held at the beginning of the morning class period, drew the researcher’s attention: “One of these tributes for which someone usually calls a van with audio equipment, plays music, recites poetry. Announced over loudspeaker, with fireworks and held in front of the school, it was a gift commissioned by a girl to celebrate the birthday of someone she loved: another girl. For a while, the everyday life of that schoolgirl was overcome by the girls' party” (Cavaleiro, 2009, p. 78). In addition to the most recurrent techniques in studies such as observations, interviews, and discussion groups (Weller, 2006), the researcher relied heavily on studies of sexuality, especially those developed by Vera Paiva (Paiva, 2006). In gathering adolescents to discuss the topic in small groups, he selected after-school hours and proposed the formulation of sexual scenarios as an initial topic of debate. The technique consists of observing the subject at the scene; that is, the participants are invited to explain, in their words, the situations they experience or have experienced, conceptualized from the central focus of the research project. By amplifying disparate narratives, it is possible to bring them closer to the “dense description of sexuality” (Cavaleiro, 2009).

Studies of the relationship between educational investments and young people and families have pointed to the home interview as an important moment to discuss schooling outside the walls of the school itself (Nogueira, 2004; Silva, 2003).

However, there are issues that prevent home interviews conducted in the presence of parents or adult guardians in the case of adolescents. While the home is often a welcoming environment made available by the interviewee, it may not always be the right place, especially when topics covered in the interview involve questions of gender and sexual orientation, among other potentially fraught topics.

A fruitful set of research on young people’s relations with school has emerged based on varied techniques whose subjects are neighborhood or youth groups (Dayrell, 2001, 2002). In Brazil, the expansion of public education is relatively recent, especially among the poor and working classes. Social inequality and its expression in a given scholastic model aimed at the middle and upper strata of society—inadequate to the needs and expectations of poor young people—produced new conflicts, challenges, and contradictions to schooling (Sposito, 2005; Dayrell, 2007).

Thus, in the face of many students’ detachment and skepticism toward the school environment, other spaces in which young people congregate sometimes offer better conditions for sociability.

In addition to the immersion provided by participant observation, other techniques can offer important tools for the development of research projects that accompany young people in various spaces to better understand their daily routines and challenges. This was the case of a study carried out with youth groups—adherents of the rap and funk scenes in low-income neighborhoods. Observations and interviews were carried out in the meeting places of the groups, in houses and concert halls, among others. But since the topic rested on an understanding of the daily life of the members of these collectives, the researcher chose to follow some young people individually in their day-to-day routines. A small group was monitored one-on-one, with the researcher following in their footsteps during a daily journey, maintaining a “participant presence.” Others were interviewed at the end of the day to report their main activities, difficulties, and challenges (Dayrell, 2001, 2005).

Successive Approaches and Research Timelines

One issue to be considered in any research project is the time variable. The lessons of anthropology, replacing the analyses of accounts from travelers, soldiers, missionaries, and colonizers of previous centuries and overcoming the evolutionist perspective of the so-called primitive societies undertaken by detached academics since Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Malinowski, 1978), published in the first decades of the 20th century, are fundamental to the realization of ethnographies and observations: prolonged immersion and observation of diverse situations, among other forms of displacement besides spatial change (DaMatta, 1991).

Another variable related to time stems from the nature of successive approaches. Mixed research methods (Moscoso, 2017), reasonably consolidated in the field of social sciences, establish the use of quantitative techniques. These can take on the characteristics of a survey, responding to the requirements of statistical rigor (sample, data processing, etc.), or can limit itself to the application of a preliminary questionnaire to a more restricted set of subjects: a classroom, members of a youth group, young people participating in a program or project developed by a nongovernmental organization or by the state, among others. This first moment constitutes an initial approximation with the research universe that will both offer important elements for later analysis and will create the first efforts of contact and recognition of the terrain, allowing for more fruitful interactions later on through, for example, a qualitative approach that uses interviews and observations.

There is also the possibility of using time creatively, as researchers may share with the research subjects—young people—the results of the initial stage in order to motivate them and build trust before the investigation reaches its deeper later stages. One experiment carried out in a public high school that sought to investigate the school climate and its possible links with misbehavior and violence required of the team a diverse set of techniques and a certain amount of creativity that favored interactions with students. The results of the questionnaire, besides providing material for an overall diagnosis of the school once it was applied to the totality of the students, were synthesized in some tables and graphs and submitted to analysis and discussion with groups of volunteer students. Each group met three or four times on a weekly basis to discuss the results. Some of the findings produced intense discussions between students, allowing them to engage in progressively deeper and important subjects while also creating possibilities for a third stage of in-depth individual interviews with those who were willing to continue the research (Sposito & Galvão, 2004).

The goal here was not simply to complement methods (quantitative and qualitative) for the purposes of analysis, but to establish a set of techniques and procedures that ensured successive approximations, requiring the group of researchers to continuously reflect on their work, since the stages after the application of the questionnaires were determined by the research process itself.

Such questions are relevant in studies of young people, who often act quite differently inside and outside of school, close to or distant from their teachers, school leaders, and their families. The subjects can manifest diverse perceptions and modes of expression in the various moments that constitute the research period, being more involved and motivated by their participation according to the most varied approaches. However, this set of procedures can also provide moments of greater reflection on the part of the subjects when the group discussions and individual interviews are carried out.

Still, with regard to the temporality of the research, another way of performing the data collection is through so-called longitudinal studies. These experiments are more common in quantitative surveys, usually performed through successive applications of questionnaires with the same cohort over time, but also by analyzing data such as proficiency and results in some standardized tests in order to ascertain teaching effectiveness (Brooke & Soares, 2008), as well as school effectiveness, teacher effect or class effect (Duru-Bellat, 2001; Felouzis & Perroton, 2007), and family influence on school performance (Nogueira, de Almeida Cunha, Viana, & de Freitas Resend, 2009). Although they are rare, research projects considering extensive data points and the evolution of processes over time can also be done in a qualitative way (Degenne, 2001).

One way to do this type of investigation is to conduct interviews with the same group of individuals at different times. These studies, also known as diachronic, consider the effects of the passage of time or situational changes and allow for the reconstruction of individual trajectories and the logics of their transformations, separating the effects of generational belonging and the effects of aging (Mercklé, 2015), which can be very valuable in a study of young people. In this way, the relations between social phenomena and individual actions become more pronounced in synchronic studies.

Felipe Tarábola (2016) presents an example of this research in his work with students from public schools recently admitted to the University of São Paulo (USP). In order to analyze the group’s challenges, Tarábola conducted interviews with the students at different times: during the period of arrival and adaptation to university life and after the first semester. With this, one can observe the process of coping with the collective challenges and draw clues about the individual responses of each student.

Sounds and Images as Sources

For decades, the humanities have looked to images and sounds for fruitful contributions to research and the production of new knowledge. The field of education has shared these insights for some time, establishing a fruitful and creative path specific to its research interests (Martins & Tourinho, 2016).

Research on young people has also benefited from these resources in view of the peculiarities of Latin American cultural contexts that primarily incorporate the masses into modernity through images, with less emphasis on written cultural forms. According to Martín-Barbero (2000), the interpenetration between orality and visual experience produces a cultural decentralization that, over time, leads to new forms of feeling and knowledge. In this case, young people would be the group expressing these changes with greater intensity due to their intimacy with new modes of visuality. This intensity derives not only from their ease of assimilating new technologies, but from new configurations of belonging and expressiveness most visibly expressed in audiovisual and digital mediations: “it is in the reports and images, in their sonorities, fragmentations and velocities that they find their rhythm, their language” (Martín-Barbero, 2000, p. 86).

In conducting research with adolescents deprived of their liberty, the anthropologist Rose Hikiji proposed a series of workshops in order to create the conditions to access these subjects, excluding individual interviews, a technique inmates are exhaustively familiar with in their dealings with judicial institutions: “The workshops would be a privileged way of entering the field: a weekly activity that could guarantee a bond with the same group for a period of at least three months was a unique way of gaining a place in the daily life of the young people and, from there, investigating the universe of incarceration. Our idea was, through the exhibition of films, debates, and video production, to have access to the universe of representations of young people in their daily life, their reality, and the ‘real world’”(Hikiji, 2006, p. 160).

Even investing in other approaches, notably the use of the camcorder to make pictures of the spaces where the young inmates lived or circulated—or of recordings and productions made by the prisoners themselves—the researcher was surprised when a young man requested the microphone and, playing the role of journalist, carried out reports and interviewed his peers, the technicians, and supervisors that were part of his routine. The surprise at the episode was not considered disorderly or a deviation from the research trajectory. It became an opportunity to expand the ways in which the data would be collected for research.

In another situation, within the school space, the researcher used a video cabin. According to the author, this is a technique used primarily in community communication projects and consists of placing a camera in a room, booth, or other appropriate space and letting people speak about what comes to mind regarding a proposed subject (Soares, 2016). The researcher installed audiovisual equipment inside a classroom and invited students to use the microphone to express what they thought about the meanings of school and education. At first, he was surprised by the formal and somewhat clichéd tone of the speeches about school life, which constituted a kind of performance. However, the students also knew how to take advantage of this moment of visibility and articulation as an opportunity to take some personal and collective advantage. For the author, what was at stake was a form of negotiation of claims of what they considered important in school life and ways of inhabiting and conceiving everyday experience, considering the audiovisual produced with the school a rehearsal space, an interplace (Soares, 2016, p. 94).

Producing films based on research, whether by those conducting the experiments or the youngsters that are its subjects, has also been a fertile resource for the production of new knowledge in youth studies. For Carrano and Brenner, research with groups of young people of poorer backgrounds gained new contours from films produced as devices enabling the dialogue between juvenile narratives and the spaces in which they circulated, the contexts of their lives and sociability (Carrano & Brenner, 2016).

Whether through photos or films produced by young people, images can also serve as an initial investigative device, a technique that can help to initiate discussions or individual interviews. Souza (2009), in an exploratory study on black masculinities, opted to use images presented to groups of black youths in order to provide moments of debate and reflexivity in the face of approaching a difficult subject that had not yet been investigated. Using photos of celebrities, young black and white artists, the researcher asked the participants to choose a photo and justify to the group the reasons for the choice. This first step made it possible to hold individual interviews with young people who had already sketched out controversial and unexplored questions about the stereotypes articulated between gender and race relations: the black man and models of masculinity.

In a research project with high school students with truncated school trajectories, Carrano and Brenner performed a concept photo album that helped to trigger the dialogue in discussion groups for the creation of autobiographical narratives. The concept photos did not refer to defined spaces and places, but to varied images such as roads, night-time traffic in the city, locks, clocks, stairs, and buildings under construction, among other things. Subsequently, the young people produced photos and videos to talk about themselves, their contexts, and their way of life. The authors indicate that the devices for collecting images, through photos or films, were treated as “challenges or tasks” that would allow them to explain, from the subjects’ point of view, what life history could be recorded and which would be significant to record (Carrano & Brenner, 2016).

Potential Benefits and Hazards of Virtual Network Research

When it comes to conducting research with young people in the various moments of their lives, it is evident that the world of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and social media appears as a relevant theme, implying the opening up of new research territories from different theoretical registers (Castells, 2013, 2014).

Although it is a complex topic somewhat beyond the scope of this article, it is necessary to present as a final reflection a consideration about the possibilities of social media to offer information and empirical material relevant to the development of research on young people. After all, the diagnosis presented by Martín-Barbero, inspired by Margaret Mead’s famous study (Mead, 1971) on cultural transmission in our society, characterizes the prefigurative culture as the substitution of the parents by the peers, instituting generational ruptures that emerge with time, and these can scarcely be understood completely. According to Martín-Barbero, “Men of very diverse cultural traditions emigrate in time, immigrants who reach a new era from very different temporalities, but all sharing the same legends and without models for the future” (Martín-Barbero, 2002).

Thus, in reflecting on the possibility of social media to offer information and empirical material relevant to the development of studies on youth, among the constituents of research practices, fieldwork in qualitative research can make use of virtual interviews (Nicolaci-da-Costa, 2009; De Oliveira, 2014), electronic correspondence, and monitoring of social media profiles and interactions, among other measures. Although there are still controversies regarding the adoption of these approaches in research, some areas of knowledge, especially in communication and its multiple interfaces, already adopt specific techniques, such as netnography (Kozinets, 2002, 2014; Amaral, 2010; Simões, 2012).

A more in-depth treatment of the tools to investigate the virtual world requires an incipient accumulation of knowledge within the field of youth research in view of the variety of themes that may be part of the empirical context: youth engagement and political activism, consumer habits, adherence to youth cultures, affective and gender relations, and sexual orientation, among others.

Adelman, Franco, and Pires (2015) provide an example of a research project about sexual orientation and gender that used virtual resources in studying narratives of young people participating in rodeo and horse riding. Their research used digital media as a tool after a long period of ethnographic insertion, which allowed previous knowledge of the universe and subjects to be investigated. According to the authors, the use of Facebook required a clear delimitation of the strategies of data collection: definition of the informants to be followed from the explicit establishment of selection criteria according to the research questions. As they say: “Although social networks like Facebook give us the impression of having a large catalog of possible informants at hand, selection invariably depends on the questions and the insertion strategies in the field, making the selection not fortuitous, easy or simple, even when compared to the selection of informants offline ”(Adelman et al., 2015).

In a kind of update of the micro-sociological perspective of Erving Goffman, the authors of the study cite the networks as having the possibility of opening new forms of representations of itself, like new instruments of daily life (Goffman, 2009). According to them, social networks, while providing elements for anyone (once connected) to elaborate a “narrative of the self” in a movement that is both “democratizing” and “reflective,” stimulate the creation of new forms of engagement in symbolic struggles and negotiations, including around social status. Finally, the authors argue that people manipulate their image to build an “enviable” persona that may or may not correspond, to a lesser or greater degree, to their lives offline.” (Adelman et al., 2015).

In this way, conclusions previously drawn from studies on the political engagement of young people hold: It is necessary to recognize the intersection between virtual and face-to-face interactions. This underscores the idea that virtual tools can be used in the intersections and configurations of so-called hybrid spaces (Pimentel & Da Silveira, 2013).

Thus, the strategy of following some young people on social media and maintaining virtual contacts can add important elements to fieldwork without necessarily replacing other face-to-face approaches. Such monitoring at later, previous, or concomitant moments with face-to-face techniques may enrich the set of sources, but they should be carefully selected using clear theoretical definitions and a consistent settled research problem to avoid a disordered and dispersed accumulation of information.

Conducting qualitative research on young people requires constant care by researchers drawing on a corpus of procedures involving established themes, research questions, and theoretical orientations. The methodological options and the diverse techniques at hand allow researchers to broaden their approaches to fieldwork. These initiatives can provide experiences that expand the researcher’s sociological imagination and creativity. This is not, however, to imply an ad hoc style characterized by superficiality. Constant rigor remains a challenge and can be achieved if there is a permanent effort to reconstruct the research trajectory. Justifying and making explicit the researcher’s choices, the paths traveled, the changes in direction, and the possible mistakes are good rules for producing new knowledge.