ABSTRACT
What I should like to do is to introduce some of the issues concerning gender relations between young people. These relations depend, of course, on young people’s perceptions of gender. Straight away I need to point out that all academic research into the views and perceptions of young people faces a huge and seemingly insurmountable problem. This is the very obvious point that the researcher, by virtue of being an adult, will not be able to enter into the lifeworld of young people as a young person. She or he will definitionally be an outsider. Virtually all research to some degree faces this problem. But it becomes particularly acute when those being researched are the young. This is so primarily because of the issue of language.
