Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore how young people in Sweden who neither work nor study perceive life experiences in relation to health and well-being.

Methods: A task-based interview technique was used and data was analysed with qualitative content analysis. Interviews were conducted with 16 participants aged 16-20 who were unemployed and not eligible for upper secondary school, or who had dropped out of school.

Results: Three themes emerged from the analysis illustrating how the young people perceive their life experiences in relation to health and well-being: Struggling with hardships in the absence of caring connections, Feeling good when closely connected to others, and Being forced to question what has been taken for granted. Each theme consists of 2-3 subthemes.

Conclusion: Based on the young people's narrated experiences health can be understood as: something that is created in relation to others and in relation to the social and cultural context; as something dynamic and changeable; as the ability to adapt and respond to challenges; and finally as something existing on a collective as well as an individual level. Implications for school, social services and health promotion initiatives are discussed, with an emphasis on working with young people.

Visualization and expression of health-related experiences and conditions by young migrants from five different countries residing in Sweden were examined in this study. Using photovoice, the participants were invited to describe and discuss their experiences in three stages: (a) document and portray their everyday lives by taking pictures, (b) discuss their findings, and (c) present their views on health to the adults who are present in their everyday life and that are important for improving young migrants’ health conditions. The overall findings indicate that temporal, spatial, and social conditions are important for the well-being of these young migrants. Thus, in order for the young migrants to feel well in a new cultural context, a search for meaning and meaningfulness in relation to time, place, and other people was important. These findings are discussed in light of social, mental, and existential health dimensions and in relation to the selected study methods Copyright © 2021 by SAGE Publications Inc.

Concerning the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015 and how it affected the position of young migrants in society, researchers have underscored the value of studies challenging one-sided images of migrant youth. This study examines how migrant positions are constituted, negotiated, and related to young people’s well-being. The study was undertaken using an ethnographic approach combined with the theoretical concept of translocational positionality to acknowledge how positions are created through historical and political processes and, at the same time, are context-dependent over time and space and thus contain incongruities. Our findings show how the newly arrived youth used multiple ways to navigate the school’s everyday life and ascribed migrant positions to achieve well-being as illustrated through the distancing, adapting, defense, and the contradictory positions. Based on our findings, we understand the negotiations that occur in forming migrant positions within the school as asymmetric. At the same time, the youths’ diverse and often contradictory positionality showed in various ways the striving for increased agency and well-being.

Mattering as a central part of well-being has not been studied in the context of newly arrived young migrants in Swedish schools. Neither have studies on mattering included material and spatial conditions. This article draws on data collected from ethnographic fieldwork to address this. The theoretical contribution is based on the combination of the concept of mattering with Ahmed’s feminist and postcolonial theory of orientation and a critical view of lived experience as social and bodily orientation devices. Combining these theoretical frameworks, we explore social, spatial and material conditions for mattering in newly arrived youths’ everyday school lives. The overall outcome of our analysis illustrates that mattering is not only a question of social relations but also related to spatial and material dimensions. A conclusion is that Swedishness as an unspoken norm of whiteness is ‘built into the walls’ of Swedish schools and that (in)directly discriminates newly arrived young migrants. © 2024 The Author(s)