Exploring the Less-Educated and Lower-Income Migrant Young People's Experience of Transition to Adulthood – a Qualitative Research in Shenzhen, China

In recent decades, many researchers  have found that young people’s transition to adulthood is greatly prolonged in terms of finishing education, entering job market, getting married and having children. Accordingly, they suggest that contemporary young people’s transition trajectories have become radically different from those of their previous generations. Among researchers on youth transition, Jefferey Arnett even contends to regard this prolonged transition to adulthood as a separate and normative life stage – emerging adulthood - between adolescence and young adulthood. However, other researchers criticize that the prolonged transition is not a universal phenomenon for all the young people. They believe that those who are socially disadvantaged and excluded incline to enter adulthood at an earlier age. On the contrary, local researchers in China find that it is just the increasing life pressure that forces the young, especially those who lack of social resources, delaying their transition to adulthood. The contradictions among existing studies indicate that transition to adulthood does not obey a normative rule. In other words, individual transition to adulthood is socially constructed. Individuals under different social and cultural contexts may have various transition experiences. This study seeks to explore the transitional experiences of the less-educated and lower-income migrant young people (with age from 18 to 33) in Shenzhen – a migrant city in China’s southeast coast, as well as how their transition experiences are socially constructed. Qualitative in-depth interview is used to collect information as rich as possible from the life stories of the participants. Grounded theory is used to analyze the data and develop new understanding of transition to adulthood. Implications of the findings for  social welfare services and policies targeting disadvantaged young people are discussed.