The Milltown Boys - a Longitudinal Ethnography over 50 Years

In 1973, Howard Williamson, as a student, moved to a ‘poor neighbourhood’, an area of social deprivation comprising some 30,000 people, eight pubs, a few shops and no leisure or commercial amenities such as sports centres or banks.

He got to know a large group of young people (born around 1960) who had little else to do but hang around the streets. That initial relationship led on to a more formalised, classic participation observation study of those young people as they moved towards young adulthood through classical working-class youth transitions.

Contact with the ‘Milltown Boys’, as Williamson designated them, then diminished over time but was never completely lost or abandoned. That allowed for a second study, anchored through semi-structured interviews, when the Boys were around the age of 40, sociologists were writing about ‘choice biographies’ and ‘risk society’, and policy was increasingly concerned about the consequences facing young people who became ‘NEET’ (Not in Employment, Education or Training), or ‘status zer0’ (as Williamson himself had depicted this group, though not through research on the Milltown Boys, in 1994). Many of the Milltown Boys had technically been ‘NEET’ in the late 1970s; what had happened to them?

Williamson interviewed 30 of the Boys in 1999, half of those on a list of 67 individuals he had drawn up with one of the Boys (seven of whom were already dead). By 2004, he had shaken hands with 47 of them.

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, the Boys were approaching 60 years of age. Williamson interviewed 12 of them online, but referred to many more, through attention to social media and word of mouth.

Transitions persist. Those like the Boys do not look too far back, or indeed too far forward. The study has significant messages for research, for policy and for practice.