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Of the one million seventy-six thousand inhabitants of Birmingham, England, there are about eighty thousand between the ages of fourteen and twenty. What are these young people doing with their leisure time? Are they using it constructively and profitably? What organizations exist to help them utilize their leisure time? Eighty Thousand Adolescents attempts to envisage statistically and to evaluate the Youth Service of the city of Birmingham. The term is used to cover all organizations which concern themselves with the leisure time of adolescents and includes those provided officially as well as various voluntary, nonofficial bodies. Although the subtitle of the book—A Study of Young People in Birmingham—indicates a general investigation of the structure of adolescent society in that city, it is in fact mainly limited to the club life, to the afterschool and afterwork life of these boys and girls. It has not the scope of a study like Elmtown's Youth in which the total life of the adolescent in a small American community is examined. Whether the recreational life of the adolescent can be fruitfully considered apart from the social structure is questionable. However, throughout the book there is an implication, although it is nowhere definitely stated and I may have received the wrong impression, that the organizational set-up is primarily concerned with the needs of the underprivileged adolescent. If this is actually so, the study has, of course, a more meaningful social setting than is at first apparent.
The picture of the Youth Service in Birmingham is one of great variety and complexity. There is an intermingling of governmental and nongovernmental organizations (with varying degrees of contact between them), of semimilitary organizations, of groups attached to churches, to industry, and to political parties. In this respect the structure of adolescent club life is similar to our own. Different and instructive is the fact that the specific leisure need