ABSTRACT
Mobility is a process that clearly affects all people, and much movement is undertaken in groups rather than as individuals. This chapter focuses on mobility especially on young people. It examines everyday mobilities within Britain though, again, some of the more general themes have much wider applicability. In much of the literature on children's play and everyday mobility there is an assumption that from the late-twentieth century children have become increasingly restricted in their independent movement. The ethnographies are designed to use a variety of interventions to probe the ways in which mundane decisions about everyday mobility are taken, and to examine their complexity and contingency. Key factors that emerge from the research are the constant need to satisfy the demands and limitations of all family members, to link together complex sets of individual and family-related activities, and to reconcile these factors with personal perceptions of risk, environmental values and mobility identities.
