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been attacked in the hallways, and students have been shot at the subway stop next to the school. Black as well as white security guards roam the hallways, stand at the doors, and interrogate any “suspicious-looking” persons. I rarely got stopped by the guards while I searched for kids to interview, while my partner, Stacy, an African American middle-class man, was stopped repeatedly. During the last year of the study, metal detectors were installed at the front doors, but this novelty was quickly criticized for slowing down the morning surge to classes, and for its lack of success in preventing weapons from coming into the building. The suspension rate was high during the first two years of the study. However, when the principal was reprimanded by the school superintendent for such a high suspension rate, efforts were quickly implemented to cut it down.

      The school’s physical building is in fairly good condition. There are only a few seriously damaged sections, and paint peels in only a few of the rooms. The greatest problem is lack of space. The building is much too small for the twelve hundred students who attend. Between classes, students push and shove as they try to make it to the next class in the allotted three minutes. Fights often erupt between classes because a student has pushed another one into the wall and one or both of them are angry. Like so many other public school buildings, this building was originally designed for a much smaller student body. Designed to be a junior high school, it was transformed into a high school when the high school was moved from its former location in an affluent neighborhood in another part of the city. The building looks like a factory, with no “real” windows, only large panes of scratched plastic “safety” windows dully covering the gaps in the walls. On sunny days the rooms feel dark and dirty, with the smudged windows preventing the light and air from coming in. Students, many of them suffering from asthma, complain that it is difficult to breathe in this building. I felt similarly whenever I spent any time there. The circulation in the building is poor and musty smells of sweat and stale science projects float through the air. This lack of circulation may be, in part, a reason why students are seen sleeping in virtually every classroom.

      The school is considered an “okay” school academically but since a more academically demanding “school within a school” left the building (it used to be located on the top floor and recruited some of the best students in the city), many have complained that all the good students have left. The school is now divided into two programs or houses—“the bilingual program” and “the traditional program.” Each program has its own floor. The bilingual program consists primarily of Puerto Rican and Dominican students. A good part of the school’s resources goes into the bilingual program and the more inspired teachers are likely to be found teaching here rather than in the traditional program. Students and teachers in both programs are acutely aware of this discrepancy, creating an obvious tension between programs. The traditional program is made up primarily of African American students and houses many of the teachers who have been teaching at the school for over twenty years. The students who participated in my study came predominantly from the traditional program.

      During the time of the study, eighty percent of the students in the school were on the city’s reduced or free lunch plan, which means their families’ incomes were close to or below the national poverty line. Dotted with empty lots and boarded-up buildings, the neighborhoods surrounding the school are considered the city’s most dilapidated and desolate and testify to a general reluctance both by city officials and the business community to invest here. A subway stop is located a block away from the school, a working-class Irish pub/restaurant sits across the street, and a small luncheonette is down the street. While many students buy lunch at the luncheonette, no students are ever seen in the pub/restaurant that is closer to the school and has food as cheap as the luncheonette. Tensions between white ethnic groups and people of color abound in this neighborhood and are practically palpable when students skirt past this Irish working-class establishment before and after school.

      When I arrived at the school from the subway stop down the street, as I did every week for five years, I was often greeted by small groups of students hanging out in the parking lot or on the steps of the school, cutting classes or being denied access to their classes because they were late to school. On a daily basis the front doors are locked and students are not allowed into the building after the second-period bell rings. However, there are many secret routes into the school, and students seem to go in and out of the building throughout the day. School security is not as thorough as the administrators claim it to be. The school is a place where some kids want to be because, they told us, it is better than being at home or out on the streets. For many others, however, it is a place of frustration, boredom, and, at times, humiliation. Nevertheless, this school is the place in which the teens in this study spent most of their days, and it is the place where the students told us their stories.

       Strategies

      My colleagues and I conducted semistructured interviews as our method of inquiry. The adolescents were first interviewed when they were in the ninth or tenth grade and then twice more in the two succeeding years. My colleague Helena Stauber and I interviewed all of the girls and some of the boys, while Mike Nakkula, Stacy Scott, and Jamie Aronson interviewed most of the boys.⁵ We tried to match interviewee and interviewer by gender in the belief that this would enhance the possibility of eliciting open and honest responses from the adolescents. Our experience eventually suggested, however, that this was not necessarily the case. Some of the boys specifically stated that they would feel more comfortable being interviewed by a woman and, subsequently, we accommodated their preference. Given my belief that continuity over time would enhance the quality of the interviews, I also tried to have each adolescent interviewed by the same interviewer each year. Due to scheduling difficulties, only ten of the adolescents were interviewed by the same interviewer during all three of their interviews. The remaining interviewees typically had the same interviewer in at least two of their three interviews.

      The interviews were open-ended and lasted from one to two hours; during the third-year interviews, they typically lasted between two and three hours. The interviews took place in the school—any available space we could find—during lunch periods, class periods, after school, and, in a few cases, during the weekends. The weekend interviews took place in a community-based health clinic down the street from the school. The interview protocol included questions concerning self-perspectives; the future; drug and alcohol use; relationships with parents, siblings, best friends, romantic partners, and role models; and perspectives about school as well as the larger surrounding community (see Appendix A for interview protocol). Although each interview included a standard set of initial questions, follow-up questions were open-ended in order to capture the adolescents’ own ways of describing their lives. I wanted to find out how, why, and when these adolescents think, feel, or act with respect to the topics we were exploring.

      To provide incentive for the students to participate, we paid them ten dollars for each interview. However, we realized after the first year of interviews that a greater incentive for some of the students was the opportunity to miss classes. While we tried to avoid having them miss core classes, inevitably they ended up missing all types—from gym to science. Teachers occasionally balked at our intrusiveness and were understandably unhappy about their students’ absences. To thank teachers for their cooperation and to give something back to them, we devoted time each week to helping them with difficult students. We ended up having good relationships with a small group of teachers who helped us find students and spaces for us to conduct the interviews. An ongoing difficulty with conducting school-based research studies is finding time to conduct interviews with students when the students are willing to do them and when the teachers will allow them to be done. In the end, however, we were able to interview all but one of the adolescents over three years (one student was only interviewed over two years). All interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed by a professional transcriber. Once the interviews were transcribed, the analytic process began.

      In order to begin to make sense of what amounted eventually, after three years, to seventy-one interviews—each approximately forty to fifty pages in length—I sought immediate help from other qualitative researchers. While there is some consistency in the ways in which qualitative researchers collect interview data, there is little consistency in the ways in which they analyze it. After spending considerable time in the vast amount of literature

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