theories of adolescence.
The Decentered Experience
Following feminist theory, I resisted framing my project within the unitary truths implied in many developmental theories, and refrained from creating my own unitary and totalizing truths as I listened to and analyzed the interviews. I tried to avoid creating theories that exclude or do not consider the fragmented, contradictory, ambiguous nature of human experience.
Recent feminist writers have emphasized the need to question and even break apart notions such as the unitary self. The “self,” feminist theorists such as Linda Nicholson and Susan Suleiman have argued, is not a unified concept but has many conflicting sides—sides that are at times incommensurable and contradictory. Like the self, one’s experience in the world also has many sides. Jane Flax encourages us to “tolerate and interpret [such] ambivalence and multiplicity. If we do our work well, reality will appear even more unstable, complex and disorderly than it does now.”33 I would add that developmental psychologists would also benefit from embracing a psychology, espoused by many psychoanalysts, that recognizes the multiple and contradictory ways in which the people we study experience their worlds, along with the numerous and conflicting ways we study and listen to people’s experiences.
A problem evident in much of the research on urban adolescents from low-income families is that these adolescents are often portrayed as one-dimensional and static. They are frequently described by researchers as “hopeless,” “present-oriented,” or having low or high self-esteem without any acknowledgment that these adjectives or phrases may only be true for some of these adolescents part of the time. As suggested in my study, an adolescent may be “hopeless” when speaking about the state of the world, but optimistic when speaking about her or his own future; “present oriented” when speaking about an abstract future, but “future oriented” when discussing her or his own life; having low self-esteem when discussing relationships with friends in general, but having high self-esteem when speaking about a best friend.
In the present study, I listened for the shifts and conflicting aspects of the adolescents’ perspectives or worldviews. The “sense of self” among these adolescents was not static but moving in many different directions at once. In my analyses, I aimed to capture some of this movement. I, as a reader, was also going in many different directions and, therefore, I noted in my analyses the various interpretations or experiences I had as I read the adolescents’ interviews.
Although my findings are centered on various themes that I detected in the interviews, none of the themes I discuss are neat and compact. For example, one of the themes concerns the outspoken voices of the girls in the study. What the girls’ interviews also suggest, however, is that these outspoken voices are only evident in certain contexts and relationships. Representing their voices as exclusively outspoken oversimplifies and thus distorts their stories. In my analyses, I note the nuances within each theme so that their stories do not get reduced to a simple set of patterns. Furthermore, there was, at times, a lack of clarity in the narratives (mine and theirs) and, therefore, my discussions often reflect these tensions: Was the theme really there? Was I only seeing it because I wanted to see it? When and why was it not there?
While I argue for heightened awareness of complexity, Susan Bordo warns us, and I concur, that there is always a limit to this “dance” of ambiguity.34 At some point, there are patterns in the ways in which we experience or see our worlds, and these patterns may exist across or within specific class, race, gender, and regional categories. These patterns are not, however, evidence of a unitary self or story, rather they are evidence that experience is always traversed by consistency as well as inconsistency, ambiguity as well as clarity. The focus of my study is on capturing differences as well as commonalities in the ways in which the adolescents speak about their worlds over time.
My Purpose, Given My Form
What does it mean to adopt these “interpretive turn” beliefs in my research? What is the aim of such ambiguous, nuanced, and patterned interpretations? I do not seek to provide an “objective” or “subjective” account of the adolescents’ narratives, but rather one that is engaged and concerned—an account that contextualizes their voices and mine within the culture that we share and that separates us. I aim to expand the repertoire of possible descriptions of adolescents rather than to find the single “right” description for all adolescents or for all urban poor and working-class adolescents. I want to offer my perspective on some of the ways urban adolescents speak about their worlds. To use Richard Rorty’s words, my intention is to continue a “conversation rather than [to] discover Truth.”35 I want to add to the ongoing discussion about what adolescents think about as their bodies and minds undergo decisive changes and their lives progress: What is important to them? How do they speak about their lives as they grow older?
Practice
The practice or methodology of my research is embedded in the beliefs I have just outlined, and more specifically, in the work of researchers such as Michelle Fine, Joyce Ladner, and Carol Gilligan, who have put these insights associated with the interpretive turn into practice in their studies of human lives.36 Although not all of these researchers have examined the experiences of urban adolescents in particular, all have been deeply influential in the formulation of my questions, my choice of methodology, and the general process of my research. They have provided insight into the ways or methods of exploring and understanding the richness and complexity of life.
Robert White, during the 1950s, was one of the first social science researchers to stress the importance of studying lives in progress. He believed that personality is a constantly evolving system: Both the person and the environment affect each other and undergo continuous change.37 Tracking this change and evolution is critical, according to White, for understanding human development. Furthermore, he asserts that personality is inherently complex and that the method used for studying lives ought to reflect that complexity. He chose the case-study approach over survey methods because he believed that through case studies the intricacies of a person’s personality can best be revealed.38
More recently, Carol Gilligan has underscored the importance of studying lives in progress, and has emphasized, in particular, the importance of listening to individuals speak about their lives. Gilligan and her colleagues at the Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development have been a primary source of inspiration and guidance for this study. By paying close attention to their empirical studies, I was able to formulate ways to address the gaps in our knowledge about urban adolescents. Gilligan and her colleagues have spent almost two decades conducting research on the lives of adolescent girls and women and, like the previously cited studies, their approach emphasizes the importance of lived experience. They also focus on coming into relationship with the girls they are studying rather than simply observing and recording the participants’ behaviors or responses. Gilligan and her colleagues perceive the research process as inherently relational—the researcher is as much a part of the “findings” as the research participant. Consequently, discussions of the relationship between the researcher and the researched form a significant part of their analyses.
Through their methods of analysis, they underscore the complexity of development, the “nonlinear, nontransparent orchestration of feelings and thoughts.”39 And in order to reveal such complexity, they concentrate both on what was said (by the interviewee as well as the interviewer) and how the person expressed herself or himself. Their method, furthermore, is explicitly attentive to societal and cultural contexts. They believe the words of adolescents cannot be separated from the culture and the societal context in which they are spoken.
Psychology has lost an awareness of voice and vision, and
