to the unexpected. I took note when I was quick to dismiss an element of an interview as unimportant, uninformative, or “wrong,” or when I was confused by an interviewee’s statement. I sought to recognize, question, and challenge my own expectations and assumptions. The purpose of such a process is, once again, not to rid myself of such expectations or pretend that they can be left behind once they have been acknowledged, but to come to the edge of my own knowledge—to ask myself what did I know that, in fact, I did not know? What did I expect that did not appear in the interview? How far does the interview take me into territory that I have not yet charted?
Examples of my own biases include those that stem from my experiences of being a white, middle-class woman in the United States. These biases have led me to perceive the world as one in which power differentials exist between men and women, white people and people of color, and rich and poor people; in each case, the former has more power than the latter. Because of these power differentials, I believe that white women struggle more than white men on both a professional and personal level; that women of color struggle more than white women; and that poor or working-class people, especially those who are women of color, have a particularly difficult time surviving in the world relative to those who are more affluent. Nevertheless, as I listened to urban poor and working-class teenagers speak about their lives and the ways in which they do and do not struggle, I realized that my vision of the world did not include many of their views. Indeed, my understanding of surviving was challenged by various adolescents who had contrasting ideas of what it means to “survive.” Some of the adolescents told me they do struggle but in ways in which I did not expect; others stated that they do not find themselves struggling either in or out of school. Some did not even know why I would expect them to be “struggling.” My expectations that the adolescents in this study, particularly the ethnic-minority adolescents, would speak about struggling to survive, about having to make conscious and strenuous efforts to simply get through each day, were simplistic. Their lives were more varied than I predicted—my biases were not “adequate.”
Throughout my analyses, I reflected upon my expectations and my interpretations. What was I not hearing? What was I not taking into consideration as I made an interpretation? I tried to maintain this reflective stance during my analyses to keep myself open to what I did not know or what my expectations prevented me from seeing. Having an awareness of and an openness to “the possibility that the situation may not fit any pattern of understanding in [my] repertoire”14 led me to more perceptive research findings than would have resulted if I had limited my understanding to those theories and ideas that were familiar to me. This process of continual reflection, I believe, enhanced my ability to understand more fully those to whom I was listening.
Biases in Developmental Psychology
Although biases based on one’s history, lived experiences, and present situation differ from researcher to researcher, there are certain biases or assumptions shared by many in the field of developmental psychology—the field in which I have been trained. In my study, I responded to three types of “professional” biases: (1) toward theory testing; (2) toward universal theories; and (3) toward specific theories of adolescence. My responses were, once again, influenced by the values maintained by the interpretive turn that I have been describing. Because these biases were both incorporated into my study and implicitly and explicitly challenged, I will elaborate briefly their content.
Theory Testing
The developmental theories of Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Harry Stack Sullivan, John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, and Erik Erikson form the very meaning of “development” in the field of psychology. It is largely within these particular theoretical frameworks or several others depending on one’s question or population of interest that researchers are expected to work when they conduct developmental research.15 Developmental researchers are expected by others in the field to use a preestablished developmental theory—a theory that has been validated as representing a “real” phenomenon in development—to frame their research questions or to make sense of their data. To proceed without such a theoretical framework is frequently regarded as “unscientific,” “atheoretical,” or “not theoretically grounded.”
While social scientists over the past thirty years have emphasized the importance of data-driven or grounded theory—theory that is built upon what is perceived in the data rather than theory that drives the interpretation of the data—developmental psychologists have typically continued to believe that the only valid knowledge is knowledge generated by testing theories. There has been a general neglect of “discovery research”—research that aims to discover rather than to test, prove, or explain. If one’s intention is to test a specific theory, using a particular theory to frame one’s research is clearly the appropriate path to take. However, if one’s intention is to listen for developmental patterns, especially among a population that has rarely been studied by researchers, using a preestablished developmental theory to examine one’s data does not make sense.16
Theory or hypothesis testing hinders researchers’ abilities to perceive the unique experiences of those in their study and makes it harder for them to see the complexities and contradictions in lived experience. A researcher may, in fact, become all but blind to such complexities by looking only for data that fit a theory rather than a theory that fits the data. In a compelling and convincing critique of the social sciences, Albert Hirschman lashes out at the “the compulsive and mindless” theorizing. He emphasizes that connections must come from the material itself and not from a presupposed theory of explanation:
[I recommend] a little more reverence for life, a little less strait jacketing of the future, a little more allowance for the unexpected—and a little less wishful thinking. … I am of course not unaware that without models, paradigms, ideal types and similar abstractions we cannot even start to think. But the kinds of paradigms we search for, the way we put them together, and the ambitions we nurture for their powers—all this can make a great deal of difference.17
While I sought, in my own study, to create theories from my data, I do not claim, following Hirschman, to begin my research from an atheoretical position. Given that my position as a researcher is bound up with the theories of my particular field, to claim such a starting point would clearly be naive. However, instead of deciding in advance which developmental theory would be most useful, I adopt a stance of theoretical openness. I am not looking for an assumption-free discovery, nor am I rejecting the usefulness of theory or hypothesis testing research; I am attempting to expand our theories to include context-sensitive and data-driven models of adolescent processes.
Martin Heidegger, whose work has greatly influenced and provoked much of the current interest in the interpretive turn, writes:
[The hermeneutic circle] is not to be reduced to the level of a vicious circle or even a circle which is merely tolerated. In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing. To be sure, we genuinely take hold of this possibility when, in our interpretation, we have understood that our first, last, and constant task is never to allow our fore-having, foresight, and fore-conceptions to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific theme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves.18
I interpret Heidegger as warning against the adherence to a theory or “popular conception” that is out of relationship with what or whom one is studying. My “constant task” as a developmental researcher is to base my theories on the data themselves as opposed to basing my understanding of the data on what I have been told is knowledge or “valid” theory. This phenomenological process will lead, I believe, to a deeper understanding of the experiences to which I am listening—“a most primordial kind of knowing.”
Universal Theories
A
