Overview

Objectives
This research set out to explore the extent to which younger generations being able to live independently is underpinned by financial and material support from parents and other relatives, as well as between friends, and considered the impact of ongoing support on young adults' relationships with family members and friends. It also considered young people's housing aspirations, the different strategies adopted by them in seeking to satisfy their housing needs, and how their own experiences compared with those of their siblings and friends.

Methods
Fieldwork consisted of 37 qualitative interviews, each beginning with the completion of a housing history grid to track participants' housing pathways since first leaving home. Participants, consisting of 22 women and 15 men aged 25 to 34 (mean age of 29), then narrated their housing histories in their own terms before more focused questions were asked. Three quarters of interviewees were graduates. The nature of the sample allowed the research to focus in particular on the changing nature of graduate housing pathways: specifically, to explore whether the relatively privileged nature of graduate housing pathways revealed by research conducted by Heath in the late 1990s still applied.

Findings
One of the key findings was that it is common for parents and older relatives to help out financially in enabling young adults to live independently. The vast majority of participants had received financial and material support from family members since leaving home. Examples included both ad hoc and regular monetary assistance towards offsetting general living expenses. These ranged from modest contributions towards household bills through to substantial one-off sums on first leaving home.

A second key finding was that the parental home provides an important fallback option for many single young adults. The majority of participants had returned to theparental home at least once since first leaving, with rent often either subsidised or waived to facilitate saving. Return was usually linked toconstrained circumstances, such as unemployment,illness, relationship breakdown or following completion of periods of study.

In addition, young adults experience considerable ambivalence about their ongoing dependency on parents, with reliance on parents for varying degrees of material and financial support long after leaving home being a common experience. Whilst grateful, they also felt that their autonomy as young adults was compromised by their dependency and that they should really be able to make their own way in life at their age.

Meanwhile, financial exchanges involving friends are generally avoided at all costs, including in the form of joint mortgage arrangements. There was a widespread reluctance to lend money to friends or to borrow from them, except for very small sums. Friends and debt were largely regarded as a toxic mix with the potential to harm friendships.