LITMIR.BIZ

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speaking about whom and in whose terms?”⁴³

      In relationship with the adolescents I interviewed, I find myself in a different position from researchers who come into their respective environments intending to stand outside of the research relationship in the name of objectivity, to study their “subjects,” and to depart with “truths” to disseminate to their colleagues, the interested public, and eventually the policymakers who shape their subjects’ lives. I understand the process of the interview to be a process of jointly constructed meaning. I listened to the adolescents knowing that I listen to how they respond to my questions and to my interests concerning their experiences of their worlds. I am not objective and the adolescents do not respond objectively or neutrally about their experiences. Each of my questions and each of their responses was filled with our own assumptions, expectations, and desires. Although I had the power to choose the questions and to interpret their responses, the adolescents in turn had the power of knowing their own experiences and deciding what to tell me and what not to tell me or the other interviewers. Even if we are socially constructed beings largely shaped by the cultures in which we exist, we are engaged in a relationship in which each of us has power over what we say and how we say it.⁴⁴

      I do, however, have power in these research relationships: power to decide what to include in my analysis and what to exclude; power to take the words of the adolescents and create meanings to which they cannot respond because I did not ask for their responses. But I assume this power with great care and trepidation, realizing throughout my analysis that I can misunderstand or misrepresent what they are saying. This knowledge makes me especially careful to “stick close” to the interview texts.⁴⁵ I quote from their interview transcripts, often at length, so that their voices can be heard throughout my interpretation. A common criticism of qualitative research has been that researchers paraphrase the narratives too much and, consequently, do not provide enough textual evidence for the themes being discussed. Broad strokes are made about human experience, and little detail is provided concerning the narrative(s) that provoked these assertions. I was mindful of such criticism as I analyzed and presented my findings. I paid particular attention to ensuring that my reader could see the narrative to which I was responding. I made interpretations only after I had reread each section of each interview repeatedly and believed that I could provide evidence in the interviews of a particular interpretation. I was wary of my own leaps of inference that take me away from the adolescents’ actual stories and into the tunnel of my own expectations. As I interpreted their interviews, I was continuously engaged in self-reflection: How have I found this theme? Where does this theme come from?

      The critical question of what it means to study a population different from my own racial/ethnic and social class background becomes less problematic when I acknowledge that my research is about relationships—relationships between me, as reader, interviewer, and a former counselor in the school, and the adolescents in the study. My power is limited by these relationships. This research project is about what the adolescents were willing to tell me and the team of interviewers (who will be introduced in the next chapter) in response to our questions. My analysis is not about what the adolescents said, but what they said to us.

       But Were They Honest?

      Since I am not able to stand outside of the research relationship, I cannot claim that what the adolescents told us is what they truly feel. However, three of the four interviewers (including myself) had worked as counselors in the school chosen for this study and were thus a familiar, and perhaps more trustworthy, presence to a number of adolescents. A consistent presence and extended relationship with many of the students in the school—although not with those who were interviewed—made it easier for my colleagues and me to engage with the adolescents we interviewed and most likely made it easier for them to relate to us. Our status as both outsiders and insiders, I believe, enhanced the students’ candor and forthrightness. Had we been fully integrated members of this community, we might have been perceived as too risky since we could have spread their stories to others in their community. On the other hand, had we been complete strangers we might have been perceived as untrustworthy. Over several years of interviewing, I came to believe that the adolescents were sincere with us since most of them appeared to speak candidly about many sensitive issues, including their frustrations at home, with their romantic partners, with their teachers, and even with our questions at times. It is also significant, I believe, that we spoke with the adolescents over a period of three years and thus created continuing relationships within which it may have become safer to speak.

      The tenets of the interpretive turn have significantly influenced the ways in which I conceive of and conduct this study. They have led me to raise questions about power; challenge, reflect upon, and engage with my own biases, expectations, and prejudices; and reframe the research endeavor as a relational process. These beliefs are firmly integrated into the specifics of my research project to which I will now turn.

      2

      A Study of Urban Youth

      WHEN I FIRST decided to study urban adolescents’ perceptions of their worlds, I had already been working for two years at the high school that would be my research site. I was a mental health counselor in training with ten assigned cases a semester—pretty plush circumstances given that the school’s full-time guidance counselors each had more than three hundred cases. While there was a tremendous need for me to take on more cases, my school-based supervisor protected me from being overloaded because I was there to be trained. Since few of my peers in training wanted to work in this school (given the ratio of need to the resources provided and the fact that we were not paid), my supervisor feared I would leave if the work load became unmanageable. I stayed on after my practicum was over to counsel students for another few years; to help procure a federal grant to set up and codirect a five-year prevention/intervention project for at-risk youth in this school; and to follow, for my research study, a group of adolescents over three years.¹ None of the students whom I counseled, however, were involved in my study.

       The Sample

      Because my intention was to conduct an in-depth investigation of urban youth in their passage through adolescence rather than to generalize to larger populations, I chose to investigate a small sample of teenagers. Twelve girls and twelve boys from the urban school in which I worked were selected from a larger pool of students who had participated in a cross-sectional study in which I was also involved.² In order to recruit students, the research team from the cross-sectional study (including myself) announced the project to all the students in ten academically diverse classrooms. Eighty percent of those who were told about the cross-sectional project volunteered to participate, and 93 percent of those students who were eligible for my smaller, longitudinal project were willing to participate in my project. The adolescents in my study identified themselves as African American (12), Puerto Rican (3), Dominican (3), West Indian (2), Bolivian (1), El Salvadoran (1), Irish American (1), or half Irish American and half Puerto Rican (1).3 Those who participated have spent most or all of their lives in the United States and speak English fluently. All came from poor or working-class families⁴ and lived in the neighborhoods surrounding the school in which the interviews took place.

       The Setting

      The school in which I conducted my research had been a fairly prestigious boys’ school with a predominantly white student body in the 1960s but has gradually transformed into a coeducational, almost exclusively ethnic minority school with a poor reputation. The mostly white teachers typically blame the students for the school’s decline; and the students, for the most part, also blame themselves, as will be seen in a later chapter. At the time of the study, the school had an approximately 33 percent dropout rate, among the highest in this northeastern city. About 25 percent of the students (girls and boys) became parents by the time they graduated from or left high school. The city’s primary newspaper has called this school “violent and dangerous”: the principal has been held hostage by

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