In 1996, with a group of colleagues, I began what was to become a 10-year longitudinal study following a generation of young people making the transition to adulthood. The research began in secondary schools in five contrasting areas within the UK, reflecting the very different environments and opportunities that shape young people's destinies. When we first met them, the young people were aged between 11 and 16. The last time we interviewed them, in 2006, they were all in their twenties.

The Inventing Adulthoods study has generated a unique record of the lives and times of a generation of young people who came of age at the turn of the millennium. They are a generation shaped by an explosion in new communications technologies, the expansion of higher education, the ‘extension’ of youth from the teens through the twenties. Yet they are also a less socially mobile generation than those who have come before them, for whom old forms of inequalities are remade in new kinds of ways. And while they may speak a ‘can do’ language, in practice many struggle to achieve the forms of autonomy, independence and integrity traditionally associated with adulthood in the West.

The research team responsible for this study has realised this extraordinary data set in a range of ways, including a series of journal articles, a book summarising the key findings of the studies (Henderson et al, 2007), teaching materials (Kehily, 2007) and the creation of a digital archive enabling others to work with the data set. We have also collaborated with other researchers to share our data, providing insights for example about how young people experience bereavement (Ribbens McCarthy, 2006). The Inventing Adulthoods study offers a broad perspective on contemporary youth transitions, following 100 young lives in five distinct localities shaped by their own economies, traditions and dynamics. Yet it also offers extraordinary depth, with up to six research encounters with each young person conducted over the teenage years – providing a document of transitions through puberty, leaving school and home and into adulthood.

In this book I realise the depth of the project, focusing on examples that are emblematic of the kinds of situations that young people find and make, and the responses and pathways that are available to them.