Out of sync: Time management in the lives of young drug users

TY - JOUR

T1 - Out of sync

T2 - Time management in the lives of young drug users

AU - Järvinen, Margaretha

AU - Ravn, Signe

PY - 2017/7/1

Y1 - 2017/7/1

N2 - The paper analyzes young cannabis users’ experiences of time from two different perspectives, one looking at how their everyday life is related to social time structures and another looking at their actual time management strategies. The paper shows that intense drug use is a reason behind the interviewees’ underinvolvement in interaction time, institutional time, and cyclic time. Yet, drug use may also be an attempt at solving problems with time management, a strategy that again brings the users further away from the social time structures of society. We identify temporal synchronicity, or rather the lack of this, as a central challenge for the interviewees’ social identities and general feelings of a meaningful everyday life. Further, we argue that the young cannabis users are both social and temporal “outsiders” to society and that new time management strategies are key to reversing this process of social marginalization. The paper is based on qualitative interviews with 30 young cannabis users in outpatient drug treatment in Denmark.

AB - The paper analyzes young cannabis users’ experiences of time from two different perspectives, one looking at how their everyday life is related to social time structures and another looking at their actual time management strategies. The paper shows that intense drug use is a reason behind the interviewees’ underinvolvement in interaction time, institutional time, and cyclic time. Yet, drug use may also be an attempt at solving problems with time management, a strategy that again brings the users further away from the social time structures of society. We identify temporal synchronicity, or rather the lack of this, as a central challenge for the interviewees’ social identities and general feelings of a meaningful everyday life. Further, we argue that the young cannabis users are both social and temporal “outsiders” to society and that new time management strategies are key to reversing this process of social marginalization. The paper is based on qualitative interviews with 30 young cannabis users in outpatient drug treatment in Denmark.

KW - Faculty of Social Sciences

KW - Time

KW - Drugs

KW - Youth

KW - Marginalization

KW - Qualitative interviews

U2 - 10.1177/0961463X15579577

DO - 10.1177/0961463X15579577

M3 - Journal article

SN - 0961-463X

VL - 26

SP - 244

EP - 264

JO - Time and Society

JF - Time and Society

IS - 2

ER -