Like so many things we do as we become what we are, leaving home is at once a peculiarly personal experience and at the same time can be shown to be very largely socially determined. This can be brought out in discussion with young people about what “home” means to them as it affords opportunities for reflection and debate, and helps them to question stereotypes - “ideal homes” - and to understand themselves and society.

Even the author of this dispassionate and wide-ranging study refers to her own experience of home-leaving in the introduction. She then embarks on a comparative and historical account before combining data from questionnaire returns from a large sample of Scottish young people with lively interview material from a sub-sample of the same. She shows how sociology should be done, making it accessible and understandable.

The complexity of influences upon the often long drawn out process of leaving, returning and then leaving again are patiently teased out with careful reference to the evidence available. Conflicting influences include demographic factors, such as declining family size and rising rates of cohabitation, divorce and re-marriage; economic ones, such as the contradictory effects of unemployment and what has been called the feminisation of male labour together with women’s growing independence and changes in the housing market and in social security regulations. Geographic factors (rural youngsters tend to leave earlier), national ones (so do young Scots - not just because more of them live in the countryside) and social changes such as the recent expansion of higher education, as well as the influence upon individuals of tradition, all play their part.

In presenting all this information, Gill Jones penetrates the stereotypes around what she calls the construction of a social problem, as well as exemplifying the application of a social theory that balances explanations in terms of structure and constraint with those that emphasise self-determination and choice. She also relates her discussion to her concern with citizenship. She wrote about this in a previous book with Claire Wallace and clears the ground for effective social policy which is, as she says, needed if youth homelessness is not to be seen in the next millennium as one of the most shameful products of late 20th-century society.

So for once the blurb on the jacket matches the content of the book, for it is indeed “the first major study of leaving home to be published in Britain”. As the author of what could be described as a minor study of a smaller sample of young people leaving home, I can only endorse this opinion and recommend the book to teachers and students of sociology at all levels.

Naturally though, anyone with even a remote claim to a sociological imagination will have some quibble and mine is that Jones uses “working” and “middle class” without definition in their popular sense, yet the meanings of these terms are changing along with changes in the divisions of labour. That is another subject, however, and, while there is plenty more work to be done - for instance, on the patterns of home-leaving and home-making among ethnic minorities who are under-represented in this Scottish study - Leaving Home will surely establish itself as the authoritative account of this transition that is so pivotal both to how we become what we are as individuals - “Look. This is me. I am a person”, says one young man describing his progress - and also to how society becomes what it is. For, as Jones concludes, “there really is no justification for creating a ‘lost generation’ of young people and then being frightened of them.”

Patrick Ainley is author of Young People Leaving Home (Cassell 1991).