Giving adolescents a voice : an interactive method for studying adolescence
Date
1993
Authors
Fatels, Lia
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Abstract
For years, a storm and stress view presided over academics' understanding of adolescence. Some recent academic literature, however, has challenged this hypothesis. The public and the media, on the other hand, still buy into this view of adolescents. This thesis explores an interactive method of studying adolescents and compares its findings with those of traditional survey methods used by other researchers. The methodology involved: (1) conducting informal interviews with some youth and developing a survey based on questions suggested by them, (2) distributing the survey to the group, and (3) analyzing the findings and sharing them with the participants for their feedback.
The main finding of the present survey is that, when compared to the other Canadian sociological surveys, the overall impression of adolescents from this study is more positive. The adolescents surveyed seemed to be happy, healthy and hopeful of the future. The differences between this survey and others might result, in part, from the fact that the questions asked in the present study were known to be important to the participants (because they chose them) and because the participants were given the chance to explain their answers (i.e. questions were open-ended). These findings reinforce the idea that representatives of the group to be surveyed should be involved in the design process and that the respondents' own words might provide more insight than statistics alone.
In the future, the survey instrument could be used either alone or with other methods combining both participant and researcher concerns for greater insight into adolescents' lives. Repeating the interview stage periodically would serve as a feedback loop. Whatever the method or methods chosen, generalizations about a group of people based on age alone (or any single criterion) must be made very carefully. It is recommended, therefore, that policy and program development, academic research and media studies should involve input from some teens at every stage of research in order to ensure that adolescents are given a voice.