I was a sociologist, but I did semi-historical work, and one of my specialties was music scenes and subcultures from the 70s and 80s in Britain and America, although I'm afraid that seems to be much less general than what you're angling for. There's a flaired user on here who specialists in 20th century youth popular culture, but I forget his name. He could probably give you a more satisfying answer.

The short answer is that a lot more of the 'history' of this stuff--post-war youth subcultures, let's say--has been done by music journalists and the like, than by academics. So without further adieu, here we go:

• There have been a lot of works published by music journalists and notable participants in those scenes. Not very academic in and of itself, but what is useful is that these are chock full of lengthy, usable quotes from notable participants which can be analyzed selectively. As in, people who weren't just there when it first happened, but who made it happen. Although as you can imagine, you don't want to over-rely on this. I've found that oral histories, such as 'Please Kill Me' (in regards to the New York/CBGBs punk scene) are especially useful. These are usually compiled by music journalists, but it's nothing but wall to wall quotes and accounts by the people who were actually there and who actually originated the whole thing.

• There has been a fair amount of sociological work done from years ago about youth subcultures. For example, the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, which was active in the 60s and 70s, and into the 80s. They wrote a lot about mods, rockers, Teddy boys, and many others. Their cultural marxist approach eventually fell out of favor, and more postmodernist approaches came into vogue in the 1990s, but just to give you an idea. A lot of it is humanities-style analysis (cultural studies, you know), but there is also a lot of more sociological work: ethnographic and interview research, content analysis of the mass media (such as Phil Cohen's work on moral panics and the mass media, which is hugely important for this vein of things), which can be treated as historical texts as they were contemporaneous with the phenomena (e.g. the Mods) in question.

To go further on the actual academic work that has been done in decades past, I would say that much, if not most of this kind of work, has come from Britain. They seem to be much more obsessed with youth subcultures and their antics than Americans are, and youth subcultures (the mods, the punks, the goths, etc.) seemed to have had a way of catching on much more virulently there than in the States. At least in past decades. (Nowadays, who can even say what's going on with the kids?)

My own personal pet theory, which I wanted to research further but didn't get the chance, is that Britain had (and still has) a bigger and much more influential tabloid press (which fuels moral panic, which attracts more kids, which enlarges the phenomenon itself, as Phil Cohen mentions but doesn't go much into), more antagonism between the social classes, and is smaller and much more densely populated and urbanized than the United States is. Not to mention more culturally homogenous, the London metropole notwithstanding. God, how I could go on.

There isn't very much from the 1980s onward in the American context, if we're talking youth subcultures such as the punks and the like. Academic ethnographies and interview studies from back then, contemporaneous with (for example) early 1980s death rock in L.A., and other such scenes, are few and far between. I think this is because from the end of the 70s on, these scenes became more isolated and contained, whereas hippies and to lesser extent punks were mass phenomena that popped up in high schools throughout all the land. When it's just a handful of weirdos, there's going to be less academic interest than if it's something like the 1960s counterculture, which affected almost everyone alive in some way or another, young and old. So you end up having to rely more on the music journalists, and on memoirs and the like, than on previous studies.

• Yes, journalistic accounts focus on the exploits of "celebrities" (for example, Henry Rollins, if you're looking at Southern California hardcore punk), but one thing you have to remember is that a lot of these scenes that seem so shrouded in legend now were very small and contained when they were actually around. Black Flag never played for more than several hundred at a time, and that was considered a huge crowd. Rollins wouldn't have been so detached from the rank-and-file hardcore kids, as Johnny Rotten would have been from the rank-and-file punks once punk became a nationwide craze. And even the legendary scenes of the 60s and 70s, such as British punk, were quite tiny and intimate early on. The Velvet Underground and the people they ran with in the mid 1960s, for example, stood out like sore thumbs even in Manhattan. They used to get harassed for having long hair.

And then again, at least at the popular level, history tends to be more interested in kings and generals than in common peasants and footsoldiers. The same dilemma presents itself.

• Here's the clencher: the ideal method, at least for us sociology types, would be for us to track down as many living participants as possible, famous or otherwise. A lot of these people are still alive and kicking. We would then proceed to interview them in the same manner that we would interview any other subjects, according to our discipline (history, sociology, etc.). In other words, we would ask them what the music journalists didn't know to ask them. Examples of such work that are out there will be more likely to pertain to the 1960s (a lot has been done about the early student movement, such as 'Freedom Summer'). I do recall a 'historical ethnography' that reconstructed life at a late 1960s high school, which is a good example of how such a method would play out, but I'd have to really dig for the reference.

• The rank-and-file perspective would be just as important as the 'celebrity' perspective. This would take a lot of time and resources--most the celebrities wouldn't be interested in talking to some boring graduate student with weird ideas, and the rank-and-file participants are scattered to the winds, although there are ways to recruit them--and this kind of thing has always been more the domain of the humanities than of proper history departments. Although bear in mind I speak from the sociological perspective.

• As such, you will find that most the research in humanities and the social sciences that has been done on teenage rebellion, or more specifically, youth subcultures (there is a subdiscipline that is called 'subcultural studies', and while edited volumes and whatnot that use the term are available aplenty, it is not without controversey), has been ethnographic and interview research, and content analysis of texts (mass media, texts produced by the subcultures in question, etc.). In other words, they focus on people doing their thing right now as opposed to 40 years ago. A researcher who is interested in goths, such as Paul Harrison, is far more likely to study contemporary goth scenes in real time than to analyze the past words and deeds of Siouxsie Sioux, Nick Cave, Dave Vanian, and the few dozen kids who were going to their earliest gigs.

I hope this wasn't too much of a mess to read.

tl;dr: academics are more interested in current youth subcultures, or current manifestations thereof (present day goths rather than early 80s goths). Historical accounts of such youth subcultures is more the provenance of music journalists and of original participants who have written memoirs.