'It's different for girls'.

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(a)

Tile: ‘It’s different for girls’

Author: Christine Griffin

Date of publication: November 1986

Publisher or source: ‘Social studies review’

(b)

In a study by P.Willis ‘Learning to Labour’ he identified two distinct white working class male cultures, which strongly influenced their career paths. Christine Griffin wondered whether she would find ‘ similarly strong cultural connection between the worlds of school and waged work for young white working class women’. She also had several other specific aims:

- To find out the differences between relationships in girls groups and boys groups.

- To show different opinions on future jobs in boys and girls groups.

- To provide information on a wide range of female students.

- To show that it’s more complicated to study girls than the lads.

The research was a longitudinal study following a group of white working class women from 6 different schools in Birmingham. She interviewed 180 school students, some of them individually and some in groups. Research was conducted in different stages: she used a series of interviews and case studies with different groups, and conducted the study in different stage.  Stage 1 was based on a wide range of female students. The 2nd stage was focused on 25 women who left the five of these schools in 1979 with a few or no academic qualifications (refers to WC people). She visited each of these women individually every couple of months in different places such as home, coffee shops, pubs, etc, during a 2-year period. In addition, she carried out 10 more case studies about jobs in offices, factories and engineering.

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In 1980 she also interviewed a group of unemployed women.

(c)

 In her research, Christine Griffin employed two stages. In the first one she interviewed a wide ethnographic range of female students ‘in order to place the experiences of those who were interviewed after leaving school into a broader social context’. This also gave her a chance to see how the different social groupings interacted. In the second stage she focused on 25 white working class girls who had low academic achievements, following their ...

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