Health Issues and Adolescents

Young people do not on the whole speak for themselves: they are spoken for by adults. Most research and policy agendas relating to young people are dominated by adult concerns about young people's health - rarely are the issues looked at from young people's perspective. This gap in our knowledge may be a critical factor in explaining some of the problems that health educators face in getting young people to transform health knowledge into action. Based on their own research, Shucksmith and Hendry relocate the issues to a young person's perspective and provide recommendations about initiatives relevant to a wide range of professionals and researchers involved in the health education of young people.

Janet Shucksmith is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Aberdeen., Leo Hendry is Professor of Education, University of Aberdeen and Professor of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. Their previous publications include Young People's Leisure and Lifestyles (1993).

Chapter 1 Young people's perceptions of their own health needs; Chapter 2 'Giving a voice to children'; Chapter 3 'You look in all these magazines and you see all these supermodels ...'; Chapter 4 'Down the Yoker'; Chapter 5 'I don't listen to everything she says ...'; Chapter 6 'I sort of get pushed into things'; Chapter 7 'It's a balance'; Chapter 8 Conclusions;