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Narratives of Teenage Boys: Constructing Selfhood and Enacting

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Narratives of Teenage Boys: Constructing Selfhood and Enacting Copyright is owned by the author of this thesis. Permission is given for a copy to be downloaded by an individual for the purpose of research and personal study only. This thesis may not be reproduced elsewhere without permission from the author. Narratives of teenage boys: Constructing selfhood and enacting identities. A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Clinical Psychology at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand. Roslyn Louise Munro 2011 Abstract In Western societies, contemporary youth discourses tell us that teenage boys are all too often ‘trouble’ and ‘troubled’, especially in terms of risky behaviour, mental health concerns, and educational under-achievement. Contemporary understandings of these issues have largely been informed by developmental psychological theory, and a plethora of management strategies and policies have emerged out of the debates about the apparent ‘boy crisis’. Yet we know little of how boys make sense of their experiences, and negotiate their relationships with the people and environments that constitute their everyday social world. This research applies a critical approach to developmental psychology and identity construction. It contributes to our knowledge of how teenage boys perform masculinities and enact resilience in diverse contexts, and how they are influenced by, and respond to, social and cultural discourses that frame and shape their behaviour and sense of self. Participants were eleven senior male students from a New Zealand high school, who provided narrative accounts of critical events during their adolescent years by means of personal time-lines and individual interviews. Findings include the boys’ understandings of peer and family relationships, high school culture, and subject positions available to them within the wider community and a global society. Boys positioned themselves individually and collectively as they reproduced, resisted, and countered age and gender stereotypes. They revealed themselves to be competent social actors in a complex world, constructing multiple identities and drawing on resources afforded by their social and institutional connections. Thus, they showed that they are actively engaged in the process of creating legitimate spaces to occupy, and which enable them to imagine possible future selves. The findings generated ideas for how we may work more effectively in our clinical practice with teenage boys if we privilege their perspectives and the meanings they attach to their everyday experiences, and problematise discursively constructed understandings of adolescence and adolescent boys. Implications of the findings for research and practice are discussed, and ideas for future research are suggested. i Acknowledgements I wish to thank the boys who participated in my research, for all that you have shared with me and taught me. You have inspired me to continue exploring your worlds so that I can hopefully keep improving my clinical work with teenage boys and girls. I would like to express my enormous gratitude to my primary supervisor, Professor Kerry Chamberlain, for your wisdom, support, and encouragement throughout my doctoral study, for always pushing me to take my ideas further than I thought possible, and for trying to help me write shorter sentences! Also, a big thank you to my co-supervisor, Dr Kerry Gibson, for sharing with me your experience in clinical, developmental, and narrative research in psychology, and for cheering me on through the tough times. Finally, I want to thank my husband, Tim, and our boys, Daniel, Matthew, and Oliver, for your unwavering patience and confidence in me all these long years. I definitely could not have done this without you. ii Table of Contents Abstract i Acknowledgements ii Table of Contents iii Chapter One: The Trouble with Teenage Boys 1 Discourses of Development 3 Discourses of Risk and Resilience 6 ‘Troubled Youth’ Discourse 9 Angry Teens 10 Misbehaving Teens 13 Distressed Teens 17 Failing Teens 18 ‘Troubled Teens’ within ‘Troubled’ Families 19 Constructing Identities 20 Deconstructing Hegemonic Norms of Masculinity 21 Cultures of Violence 22 Cultures of Sexuality 24 Student Identities 26 Sporting Identities and Practices 27 Chapter Two: Storying the Experiences of Teenage Boys 30 Research Aims 30 Methodology 30 Theoretical Framework 32 Identity Construction and Meaning-Making through Narrative 32 Discourses and Subject Positioning in Narrative Identity Construction 34 Methods 36 Participants and Recruitment 36 Data Collection 37 iii Ethical Considerations 43 Data Analysis 46 Chapter Three: Analysis and Discussion 52 Negotiating Self 53 Developing Self 54 Maneuvering around the Genderscape 61 Making Sense of Difficult Life Events 69 Negotiating Family 79 ‘Home is where the heart is’ – or something like that 81 Freedom From and Freedom To 86 Negotiating Friendship 90 Identity Work in Peer-Inhabited Spaces 91 Virtually Social 99 Negotiating Love 102 Negotiating Society 110 Responding to the Critics 110 Forging Global Identities 116 Practising ‘Good Citizenship’ 124 Negotiating Future 133 Constructing Future Selves 134 Reconstructing Existing Contexts and Changing the World 137 Chapter Four: Conclusions and Implications 141 Implications for Research and Practice 146 Suggestions for Future Research 153 References 155 Appendices Appendix A: Participant Information Sheet 177 Appendix B: Participant Consent Form 179 Appendix C: Summary of Findings for Participants 180 iv Chapter One: The Trouble with Teenage Boys Imagine driving down an unfamiliar, deserted street at dusk when a punctured tyre forces you to pull over. You go to call home to say you will be late, but as luck would have it you discover that the battery of your mobile is as flat as your tyre. Just as you are getting out of the car, you glance up and see a boisterous group of teenage boys round the corner and head in your direction. What goes through your mind when you look at them? Well, that may very much depend on what you think you know about them. The ways that we construct adolescence and adolescents informs how we see, understand, and relate to young people and, in turn, have a direct impact on their lives. This research aims to explore ways that teenage boys construct their identities and negotiate adolescence. I take a perspective that seeks to understand the social and cultural processes and meanings embedded in boys’ narrative constructions of their experiences and relationships, and the social and political agendas that provide contexts for the knowledge we construct about them. I propose to investigate these ideas by first considering historical and contemporary discourses of adolescent development, risk and resilience, and ‘troubled youth’. I then endeavour to show how the construction and enactment of boys’ identities are framed and shaped by ‘common-sense’ understandings of adolescence and masculinity. I think it is worth explaining at this point that I use the terms ‘adolescents’, ‘youth’, ‘young people’, and ‘teenagers’ interchangeably because I have been unable to find, or create, an alternative expression that might preclude connotations of age, biology, or gender. I suspect, however, that I tend to privilege the ‘teenager’ label because that is how they most commonly refer to themselves. There is an abundance of research describing and categorising the behaviours and developmental pathways of ‘troubled youth’ (Helgeland, Kjelsberg, & Torgersen, 2005; Hurrelmann, 1990; Kalafat, 2003; Smollar, 1999). Much less common are studies that seek to explain how boys negotiate their journey through the adolescent years and orient their behaviour in relation to others. Why is it, then, that the voices of 1 teenage boys have rarely been heard? Perhaps their reputation for communicating in monosyllabic grunts, or a barely perceptible raised eyebrow, has deterred researchers from exploring the world of adolescent boys from their perspective. A research endeavour that seeks to explore shared meanings of adolescent experiences, and how they relate to notions of self-identity and group values, may be met with less resistance than approaches aimed at eliminating ‘problem’ teenage behaviour (Gergen, Lightfoot, & Sydow, 2004). Blackbeard and Lindegger (2007) also suggest that there is a need for innovative approaches to studies with teenage boys that encourage their active participation in the research process. The point is that if we are interested or concerned about what drives boys’ behaviour, and if we hope to shed some light on how they make sense of their world, then we should be actively engaging them in our research endeavours. In the public mind, youth culture is at once vibrant, exciting, and energetic, but also threatening (Bottrell, 2009). During the past two decades young people in general, but boys in particular, have been the subject of much media attention and they are increasingly portrayed as a social problem. What has been called the ‘crisis in masculinity’ has also provoked a surge of academic research (Sherriff, 2007). Considerable energy and resources are directed towards finding solutions to eradicate ‘problem’ subcultures, such as ‘boy racers’ and youth gangs, which are constantly under public scrutiny and in the media spotlight. Boys are also being increasingly targeted for special attention in education to address their apparent failure to achieve academically compared with their female peers (Phoenix, Frosh, & Pattman, 2003; Weaver-Hightower, 2003). The need for
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