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Studies of farm families have largely neglected the position of farm offspring who, through necessity or choice, live their lives away from the farm. This article explores how Irish farming offspring who will not or are highly unlikely to be farm successors frame their relationship with the farm, as well as their attitude to and role in the succession process and the continuity of the farm within the family. Particularly, the concern is to know how attachment to/detachment from the farm and home life are shaped and the implications for how they construct their identities. The article is based on a qualitative narrative study of 30 young adults from farm backgrounds attending university. It is argued that the ‘non‐successors’ in this cohort have a deep attachment to the farm as an enduring place in their lives. This has key implications for the desire to retain the farm within the family. The article demonstrates that while there is acceptance of enduring gendered cultural scripts surrounding succession, non‐successors demonstrate their attachments in key terms, namely through a collective and secure sense of ownership; a sense of responsibility in maintaining the intergenerational legacy and continuity; and the articulation of the farm as a repository of memories.

The purpose of this research was to examine the extent to which social support and wider community perceptions/engagements among adolescents are connected with well-being. We compared adolescents in two different societal contexts, Florida in the United States and County Offaly, in Ireland, and posed the questions: What are the key predictors of subjective well-being from the various sources of support, and to what extent does the impact of social support on well-being vary across these two societies? Questionnaires were completed and returned for 607 respondents (322 in the Irish study and 285 in the Florida study). A variety of scales were adopted and designed to operationalize our key concepts of: Adolescent well-being, social support, school satisfaction, neighbourhood quality of life and community/voluntary participation. Our results indicate that informal social support and school satisfaction were the strongest predictors of youth well-being in both locations, despite some differences in terms of individual influencing variables. From informal sources, emotional support from friends and advice/concrete/esteem support from parents emerged as important predictive dimensions. Liking school, perceptions of doing well in school were the main predictors of school satisfaction in Ireland while, in Florida, student camaraderie and the experience of bullying emerged as significant.

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