Introduction

Abstract

This book is about the experiences of 17 teenagers, their significant others and some midwives, from pregnancy realisation through the early years of motherhood. The agency-centred accounts from the teenagers and these selected others provide a counterbalance, and indeed something of an antidote, to the usual pathologising of young people who opt to ‘do’ their adolescent years differently from their mainstream peer groups. These narratives reflect trends in academic circles which increasingly favour methodologies for accessing participants’ voices, especially those considered marginalised. The need to actively pursue such approaches is imperative to the research enterprise, not least because they help to expose the ‘classed’ dimensions of participants’ experiences which, eventually, may provide something of a challenge to conventional, and majority, viewpoints.