Background

Adolescents’ lives are shaped by the social context in which they live. A number of key social institutions structure and dominate their lives, such as those of education, family and part-time employment. It is an intensely social time of life; friends, peers, classmates, parents, extended family, teachers and neighbourhood groups are all critical. Pressures and expectations arise from several directions at once, and although we are more healthy, wealthy and comfortable than at any time in the past, British teenagers are undoubtedly subject to a range of stresses.

The general well-being of British adolescents has been the topic of considerable debate in recent years, but are today's young people any more stressed than previous generations? Are they any more depressed or anxious? Do we have useful and robust evidence on this? If so, what might have changed about the social context that might be particularly salient for their lives?

Indeed, evidence has suggested that the current level of behavioural and emotional problems in teenagers is higher than in the past. Our work in this area began in 2004 with the publication of a study funded by the Nuffield Foundation, which provided specific evidence on time trends across 1974, 1986 and 1999. Undertaken by Barbara Maughan, Stephan Collishaw, Robert Goodman and Andrew Pickles, the comparison of large-scale surveys of 15/16-year-olds at each point in time showed rises for problems such as depression, anxiety and conduct disorder (Collishaw et al, 2004). In fact, addition of a fourth wave of data collection from 2004 suggested that by this time the time trends may have been levelling off, providing cause for guarded optimism. As Stephan Collishaw's chapter in this volume shows, this still, however, leaves young people of today with a general level of emotional and behavioural problems that is significantly higher than it was for 16-year-olds living through the 1970s and 1980s. And it still leaves us with questions about why this might be the case. That is what this volume is about.