Читать книгу Everyday Courage - Niobe Way - Страница 16

A third professional bias that influenced my study relates to particular theories of adolescence. Unlike the other two biases, however, I engaged rather than resisted this prejudice. While there exists an abundance of theoretical and empirical work on adolescent development, there has been a preference among social scientists, teachers, and other professionals for specific theories of adolescence. Certain theorists have dominated the adolescent scene for many decades (e.g., Erik Erikson, Peter Blos, Harry Stack Sullivan) or over the past decade (e.g., Carol Gilligan, Robert Selman), and their ideas have profoundly affected the ways we think about adolescent development. The core beliefs of these theories are critical to spell out because they reside in our psyche and in the culture at large; and they determine, to a great extent, what is considered sound and accurate data on adolescents.

One of the most pervasive beliefs about adolescents initially proposed by psychoanalysts and neo-psychoanalysts that has been fiercely adhered to since its introduction is the idea that adolescents are struggling to find an identity.²³ The aim of this struggle is to find a sense of self that is stable and continuous—adolescents want to answer the question, “Who am I?”²⁴ The identity struggle of adolescents, the topic of hundreds of articles, novels, and movies, forms the core of how we define adolescence. Closely related to this concept of identity are the concepts of autonomy and independence. Adolescents are striving for autonomy, freedom, and independence.²⁵ Indeed, adolescence has become synonymous with the arduous struggle for an independent selfhood or for an autonomous sense of self. Adolescents are moving away from their parents emotionally and physically—“trying to free [themselves] from parents who made and partially determined [them],”²⁶—and are relying more on their peers for guidance and support.²⁷ This vision of adolescence perceives this period in the life span as a time of searching, separating, and distinguishing oneself from others. It is also a model that is primarily based on studies of boys and has been criticized by numerous psychologists as being a “male model” of development.²⁸

Responding to the absence of girls and women in developmental research, Carol Gilligan and her colleagues began to investigate the experiences of girls and women. Gilligan and her colleagues found that girls are struggling to stay connected to themselves and to others during adolescence. Adolescent girls typically find it difficult to be themselves—to be authentic—and to be in relationships with others. The research of Gilligan and her colleagues indicates that adolescent girls often feel the need to silence their real thoughts and feelings in order to be cared for by others.²⁹ Their work, along with similar research on girls and the research on adolescent boys, have reinforced the widely held belief that adolescent girls are more relationship oriented and adolescent boys are more interested in separation, independence, and autonomy.³⁰ For example, adolescent girls have intimate and self-disclosing friendships, whereas adolescent boys have competitive relationships with their male peers that focus on sports and playing games.³¹ While these assertions have frequently been based on comparisons across studies using entirely different research methodologies,³² they are firmly maintained and repeated frequently in the research and popular literature on adolescents.

These concepts and beliefs about adolescent boys and girls pervade our understanding of what it means to be an adolescent and have significantly affected my study. While I have attempted to generate theory from the data, I have never been theory neutral or absent. I have been responding to the theories I have been taught. I was struck by and drawn to stories in the teens’ interviews that tell a different story from what we have heard. Yet, I was also pulled to stories that tell a similar story. And, as the reader will hear shortly, both types of stories are present in the interviews. While I sought to derive data-driven themes, these themes are always implicitly and explicitly a reaction to our popular theories of adolescence.