the limitations in more quantitative approaches to research, anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists have recently been listening to adolescents, including those who are poor or working class.25 These qualitative researchers have gone to great lengths to avoid overly simplistic or reductionist portraits of the adolescents they study. Nevertheless, like the more quantitative studies, the majority of the qualitative studies on urban poor or working-class adolescents have concentrated either primarily or exclusively on populations involved in high-risk behavior or have focused on only one or two components of an adolescent’s world. Furthermore, few have taken a developmental approach.26 Studies such as Anne Campbell’s compelling exploration of gangs among adolescent girls, or Jay MacLeod’s wonderfully descriptive account of two groups of working-class boys, provide us with much-needed information about the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of their participants and about the structural barriers that prevent them from reaching their dreams.27 These studies, however, do not provide us with an account of how adolescents perceive their worlds as they grow older, or of the nature of their intellectual and emotional evolution. Listening to a wide spectrum of adolescent girls and boys, as well as discerning how they perceive a wide variety of topics relevant to their daily lives (e.g., themselves, their relationships, their school, the larger society, etc.) over time, is critical for a rich and full understanding of adolescence.
In my three-year longitudinal, qualitative study of twenty-four urban adolescents, I sought to explore their perspectives about many different aspects of their lives, to reveal the multifaceted nature of their lives, and to add their diverse voices to the research literature on adolescents. My questions were threefold: (1) What are the various ways in which urban adolescents perceive their worlds? (2) How do their perceptions change as they go through adolescence? and (3) How do their voices affect our understanding of adolescence as a critical phase in human development? I was intent on exploring areas that have rarely been examined by researchers studying urban youth in particular, and human psychological development in general.
Bronfenbrenner’s idea of what constitutes one’s world (one’s “ecological environment”) includes not only the home, school, and workplace, but also the larger society (the “overarching institutional patterns of the culture”) in which a person lives.28 I have incorporated this definition into my understanding of what makes up an adolescent’s world. I also owe a debt to Karsten Harries’s interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s conception of “world”:
“World” cannot mean the totality of facts. Think rather what we mean when we speak of the “world of the baseball player.” “World” here means not just bases and balls, ball parks and hotels, players and umpires … but first of all a mode of existing, a way in which the baseball player relates to things and persons and to himself.29
I aimed to listen to urban adolescents’ perceptions of how they relate to themselves, to family members, to peers, to important others, to institutions (such as school), and to the larger culture. I was less interested in the actual existence of certain conditions such as urban violence or poverty (which are the “totality of facts”) as I was in the adolescents’ “mode of existing” or “ways of relating” within these structural constraints. I investigated the ways in which a group of adolescents speak about their values; about what makes their lives worth living; about their futures; and, finally, about how they experience school and the society at large.30 I did not attempt to produce separate findings with respect to each of these topics, but rather to detect themes that arose when these adolescents spoke about a range of their experiences.
My research was driven by my desire to go beyond what Toni Morrison has called “the panoramic view”31—the view put forth by the media and social science research. I wanted to learn more than what I had seen and been taught (e.g., that living in the inner city is dangerous and depressing). I wanted to listen to the voices and hear the experiences of adolescents growing up in poor, urban areas so that I might come to understand what their worlds “feel like and what they mean personally.”32 With this understanding, I hoped I would be better equipped to help these teenagers thrive.
The book is organized into eleven chapters. The first chapter, divided into two parts, presents the theories that inform my study. The first part focuses on the various philosophical, psychological, and feminist theories that have shaped both the research process and the outcomes of my study. The second part of the chapter discusses how these theories have created a practice of research. It is this practice of research that I have adopted in my own work. The second chapter provides details of the study: the teens involved in the study, the setting of the study, and the data-analytic techniques used to detect themes in their interviews. In the third chapter, I open the discussion of my findings with a case study of Malcolm, an adolescent boy. I devote a full chapter to Malcolm to establish and emphasize the individuality of the adolescents in the study before I discuss, in the later chapters, the common themes heard among them. In the following six chapters, I present common themes that I detected in the teens’ interviews. These themes are not always present across or within their stories; they surfaced in some interviews and were notably absent in others. Tracing each theme and its absence led me to identify smaller subthemes, tributaries that further complicated the overarching themes. These themes and subthemes are discussed at length in these six chapters. In the tenth chapter, I offer another story of a life in progress. This case study is of Eva, an adolescent girl. Once again, I attempt to underscore the singularity of the stories that the adolescents told me and my colleagues. In the epilogue, I discuss how the themes intersect and what questions they raise for our understanding of urban adolescents, adolescence, and more generally for the field of social science as a whole.
Before continuing, I want briefly to note what my book will not address. It does not provide an overview of the growing body of research on urban poor, working-class, or ethnic-minority adolescents or any other group of adolescents. Numerous books and research reports have been written over the past decade that have summarized the research findings on these populations.33 I only make references to previous research when it relates directly to the themes that I detected in the interviews. Furthermore, my book does not present an overview of the cultural beliefs and attitudes among different ethnic groups except as they relate to the themes detected in the data. A problem with inserting homogenizing statements about “Puerto Rican families” or “African Americans” is that such assertions typically ignore the tremendous variations within ethnic and cultural groups. The history, immigrant status, family structure, economic opportunities, political orientation, and even individual personalities within the family will likely influence, for example, the cultural values of a Puerto Rican family. Yet the current fashion in the social sciences is to present global, undifferentiated statements about “Hispanic families” or “black families.” I will cautiously draw on such cultural stereotypes, for that is what they are, when I believe they add insight to a particular theme being discussed. In addition, due to the small number of teens from each ethnic group (e.g., only two Irish American students), I do not attempt to locate ethnic/race differences in the interviews. While ethnic/race differences were rarely suggested, it is impossible to determine whether that was the result of small numbers or a reflection of broader patterns. Also, I focus only on the adolescents’ perceptions. My study is not an ethnography of urban adolescent life.34 It simply explores the narratives of a group of urban youth over time. Finally, not all topics discussed in the interviews are presented in the book. While the adolescents spoke about their siblings, for example, these relationships are discussed only when they relate to the central themes. This book presents the themes that I discerned in the interview data rather than all the components of an adolescent’s life that may be important. Undoubtedly, the reader will note additional omissions or topics that are not adequately addressed in this book. However, I chose to address those topics that seemed most pressing when the teens in the study spoke about their worlds.
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Interpreting Narratives
AS
