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Reading for specific themes is an approach based loosely on “The Listening Guide”’s third and fourth readings. In the original version of the Guide, the third and fourth readings consist of reading for voices of justice and care. However, my analysis was data rather than theory driven and, therefore, I did not read for such voices. Instead, I read for the common themes detected in the conceptually clustered matrices and the first two readings of the interview texts. I read the interviews searching for the location of where and how frequently each common theme emerged in the adolescents’ interviews. The conceptually clustered matrices offer only a rough outline of this information. Unlike the two previous methods, “The Listening Guide” focuses on both the narratives’ content or what was said, and on the form or how it was said. Reading becomes a process whereby the reader listens not only for evidence of a theme, but also for points where the theme is revised, drops away, or is conspicuously absent. The reader highlights each theme with a colored pen, creating a trail of evidence indicating where and how frequently a particular theme emerges in the text. I, as the reader, look for the nuances in the theme and the places where the theme is not as clear as it is in the other parts of the text. As I discussed in the previous chapter, I attempted to remain aware of the interplay between who I am, what my expectations are, and what I see and hear in the adolescents’ interviews. In each reading of an interview, I sought to “hold and represent the sense of tension that people often convey … in order to capture the situational, the personal, and the cultural dimensions of psychic life.”¹⁵ I attempted to track the common themes that weave throughout each person’s narratives. The themes I followed were clear at some moments and difficult to detect at others. I aimed to incorporate these tensions into my analysis of the interviews.

My three methods of data analysis—the revised version of “The Listening Guide,” narrative summaries, and the conceptually clustered matrices—helped me to hear the veritable pitch of a given theme as it rises and falls throughout the narratives I follow. They encouraged me to be sensitive to difference, variation, and contradiction while at the same time enabling me to perceive patterns and continuities. Most important, they allowed me to begin to understand and make sense of the masses of data we collected over three years.

These methods, furthermore, helped me meet a central goal of my research; namely, to describe and interpret what the adolescents said and how they said it. Given the lack of knowledge and the stubbornly maintained prejudices about this particular group of adolescents, I wanted to simply listen closely to their stories. I wanted to resist the immediate temptation to explain why they told such stories (although I do provide explanations at times). Explanation, though necessary, involves distancing oneself from the actual words of the participants, and I wanted to stick close to their words. In future studies, I can begin to explain more thoroughly, and these explanations will, by that time, be firmly grounded in the teens’ perceptions.