This research explored processes of identity construction that teenage boys engage in, perform, and negotiate within their everyday social contexts. The study was aimed at gaining insights into how boys make sense of experiences that they see as having a significant impact on their lives. A further aim was to consider how psychologists who work with teenage boys might use this knowledge to inform and enhance their clinical practice. My interest in this topic has evolved out of a nagging sense that our society has become so troubled by ‘troubled youth’, and so preoccupied with marshalling resources for the control and treatment of their ‘problem behaviours’, that the perspectives of teenage boys about what they perceive as troubling, challenging, and complicated remain relatively unexplored. How the actions of teenage boys are evaluated depends on the domains in which they are enacted, and on whether it is adults or their peers who are making the value judgements (Fine, 2004). That is, it is not necessarily the choice of behaviours per se that determine their legitimacy, but how they are interpreted in the context of socially constructed boundaries.
The boys in this study have shown themselves to be communicative, imaginative, and reflective narrators of their lived experiences, contrary to popular stereotypes of adolescent boys as unemotional and inarticulate (Pattman et al., 2005). They certainly do not portray themselves as lurching blindly through a maze of biological chaos and psychological dilemmas, as traditional understandings of adolescent development might suggest. Rather, they are active agents in the construction of their personal and social identities, investing in particular subject positions as they reproduce, resist, and rupture pervasive and conflicting discourses of adolescence and masculinity. My research findings suggest that the construction and enactment of their multiple and often ambiguous identities involves complex negotiations, as they interact with the people and institutions that constitute their everyday social terrain. Boys locate their narratives within the context of family, friendship, and community networks, suggesting that these are contexts that can potentially provide important social, emotional, and tangible resources (Bottrell, 2009). Yet, it cannot be assumed that the
process of negotiation or the outcomes of their negotiations will always be experienced by boys as positive or liberating (Hird, 1998).
The following are the key ideas that emerged from my research analysis. Teenage boys construct themselves as maturing out of their younger selves through a gradual process of accumulating experience and knowledge. They see themselves as growing in social competence and becoming increasingly skilled as they gain new insights about themselves and the world around them. They position themselves in relation to their peers, in order to demonstrate different ways they understand ‘maturity’ and ‘immaturity’ to be embodied and performed. At times they may find themselves in conflict, torn between the pull of mature reasoning and the familiar comfort of childish self-indulgence (Fine, 2004). To some extent, boys depict the process of maturation as an expected phase of their development, and yet their trajectories are not clearly defined. Rather, they seem to understand ‘growing up’ in more fluid terms that allow them to shift back and forth between loosely circumscribed notions of childhood and adolescence.
Teenage boys have to negotiate socially constructed gender orders and discourses of masculinity that are legitimated and reinforced within their everyday relational and institutional contexts. At school they experience pressure to compete for social status and prestige with their male peers, especially in academic and sporting domains. Yet, they also understand that they can empower themselves by standing in opposition to hegemonic norms and constructing alternative masculinities as equally valid. Boys in this study show some awareness of the public debates around differential educational outcomes for boys and girls, but do not see them as particularly relevant to their own experiences. It is not surprising that, for boys who achieve well academically, discourses that view adolescent males as failing within a biased education system would make little sense to them.
Gendered ‘rules’ are understood to police boys’ overt expressions of emotion and vulnerability. These normative rules may be ‘learned’ from parents, for example, and reinforced by peers and adults in the school environment. Thus, dominant discourses of masculinity that view males as emotionally shallow, or promote toughness, aggression, and rationality as qualities for males to aspire to, can create considerable
tension and confusion for boys when they experience sadness, grief, fear, and worry. Boys may justify their resolve to conceal their distress by framing it as a demonstration of courage and strength. However, boys may also show the capacity to question gendered assumptions and practices around expressing difficult emotions and support-seeking.
When boys experience particularly difficult life events, they may construct and enact resilience by emphasising their connectedness to the people and organisations they recognise as valuable resources in their lives. Meanings boys derive from adverse experiences are also embedded within their cultural worldviews, which may cue them as to ‘culturally appropriate’ ways to understand and handle their problems. Boys’ narratives suggest they perceive a sense of agency in looking for opportunities to use what they might learn from challenging experiences in ways that can enhance their own and others’ lives. In some cases, this could also be interpreted as the effects of a socially constructed directive for individuals to grow stronger from experiences of adversity and to push themselves to reach their ‘full potential’ in life.
Multiple versions of family life are constructed by boys and situated in relation to normative ideas about ‘typical’ family structures and practices. At times their stories follow what Andrews (2004) refers to as “normative scripts”, for example when they reproduce notions of ‘the happy, nuclear family’. However, there are also instances where they trouble such notions, for example when family extends across multiple cultural contexts and geographical locations, or when boys experience major family transformations and see themselves as contributing to the successful shaping of their reconfigured households. Teenage boys are seen to place a high value on having close bonds with other family members, especially their parents, and to prize shared time, open communication, and parental involvement in their everyday lives. At the same time, they also look to create opportunities for greater independence and freedom from parental control. Boys in this study do not describe their desire for autonomy as particularly problematic, in terms of its potential to generate conflict at home. Instead, they conceive of it as a gradual process of change that calls for a sharing of perspectives and ongoing negotiations between them and their parents.
Important identity work occurs in the context of teenage boys’ interactions and relationships with their peers, and much of this enterprise is understood to take place in the high school environment. The initial transition to high school is experienced by some boys as especially daunting, since it represents a foray into an unfamiliar social landscape. It can be a time when much effort is expended negotiating new friendships and peer group membership. Boys encounter many dilemmas as they try to fit in, particularly among their male peers, whilst also attempting to define, express, and maintain their individuality. In some contexts, they may choose to conform to dominant norms of behaviour in order to blend in more easily, in the hopes of being accepted by their peers. On other occasions boys may position themselves as ‘unique’ by publicly enacting aspects of their self-identities that signal difference. Such strategies might also enhance their social status, or, conversely, see them othered by their peers. Thus, teenage boys make tactical behavioural decisions in their peer interactions as they negotiate complex systems of normative adolescent and masculinity practices. In other words, boys understand these identity construction processes as involving personal agency, but also experience themselves as constrained by the powerful influence of dominant codes of social behaviour.
Within emerging romantic relationships, boys take up positions that emphasise the value they attach to emotional intimacy, sensitivity to others’ needs and desires, and having opportunities to share their views about ‘serious and personal’ matters. These ideas are presented by boys as a contrast to what they see as typical interactions among ‘the guys’, characterised by cracking jokes, hanging out, and having fun. So when teenage boys become romantically involved, they not only have to negotiate this new kind of relationship, but they also have to figure out how it can be accommodated into their existing friendship contexts. When boys embark on a relationship that may, for whatever reasons, be frowned upon by their peers, parents, or society in general, some might feel obliged to hide away from critical eyes. What could be at stake, however, is that important aspects of their selfhood might be also be suppressed in their attempts to avoid being criticised or ostracised.
Technological developments have provided new forms of communication and socialisation, which, in turn, create ever-evolving and culturally specific forms of adolescence (Burman, 2008b). Online activities and social networking could now be
considered practically mainstream as sites that offer boys opportunities to invent and reinvent versions of their selves, and to play around with fantasy personas. For some boys, it is constructed as a space in which they can experiment with aspects of themselves that they would normally conceal in face-to-face interactions. Online gaming is one domain in which technological expertise is highly valued and, therefore, can represent social capital for boys who may be marginalised in other peer contexts. Boys also see the cyber world as providing opportunities to explore new social relationships without the usual constraints determined by place, time, or age.
Outside of their family and school environments, boys gain social and cultural knowledge through the lens of the media and in their interactions with the local community and the wider society. They express frustration and bemusement at what they mostly seem to interpret as negative and stereotypical representations of adolescent boys and teen cultures, which de-emphasise social context and depict young people as an homogenous group. Boys’ engagement with the media and deconstruction of dominant narratives constitutes part of their everyday identity work.
Boys today are growing up in multicultural environments and an increasingly global society. Their cultural identities are being continually shaped and hybridised by their exposure to cultural diversity. Cultural forms are produced, assigned meanings, and appropriated through interactions between self and other (Bucholtz, 2002). When boys observe different social and cultural practices and value systems, they make choices about which aspects of these experiences to integrate into their emerging worldview, thus engaging in the process of constructing their cultural identities.
According to Erikson’s (1968) model of psychosocial stages of development, boys nearing ‘young adulthood’ status would be expected to seek greater autonomy and independence, exhibit increasingly ‘prosocial’ behaviours as understood by conventional notions of morality, pursue normatively proscribed pathways towards ‘appropriate’ vocations, and begin to consider their future roles, for example, as husbands and fathers. Agendas such as these are promoted within individualistic cultures, and I would argue that all of these ideas have been discursively constructed as representing the groundwork necessary for the development of ‘good citizens’. Discourses of citizenship are embedded in sites that teenage boys are typically
expected to explore in order to prepare them for the adult world. They are increasingly socialised into normative adult roles, for example when they participate in paid employment and volunteer work. However, they do not passively engage in taking on adult-type roles or being ‘socialised’ (Connell, 2005), as evidenced by the meanings they attach to these social encounters. Boys perceive their engagement in such activities as providing important opportunities for them to demonstrate independence, integrity, responsibility, competence, self-discipline, and self-regulation. Similarly, boys deny the power of peer pressure, instead claiming to have control over their behaviour in the face of ‘negative’ peer influences. I would argue that their narratives illustrate how boys enact ‘good citizenship’ in accordance with well-established discourses of adulthood, as a way of positioning themselves as worthy of a place in the wider social collective.
Boys imagine and construct possible future selves through a process of reflection about who they are, how others may see them, what they believe is expected of them, and what they understand to be their available personal, social, and cultural resources. In this study, boys’ narratives are predominantly embedded in educational and citizenship discourses that view formal qualifications and career success as appropriate and important goals for young men today. These discourses potentially position other pathways as inferior and risky. Boys also construct possibilities for change in the future in response to negative or limiting experiences in their current lives, and possibilities for social action out of their engagement with discourses around contemporary social and political issues. Thus, they can conceive of multiple subject positions and spaces they might choose to inhabit at some future time.
Implications for Research and Practice
The overall wellbeing of teenagers is understood to have declined, in spite of major growth in research into the psychology of adolescence. However, integrative theoretical and methodological developments in the field of adolescent psychology are emerging (Compas et al., 1995). Compas and colleagues (1995) believe this trend reflects a change from previously held assumptions of adolescence as an inherently stressful, problematic developmental phase, to a view that teenagers can and do
contribute to society in positive ways. Thus, the notion of adolescence as a distinct developmental stage may be gradually dissipating in favour of new understandings of adolescent behaviours, cultures, and identities, embedded and constructed within the context of conflicting social discourses. The challenge for developmental research is to redirect efforts towards an exploration of the meanings and processes of change and difference, which would demand a shift away from taken-for-granted assumptions of change or difference as inherently positive or negative (Burman, 2008b).
Research also needs to be ‘clinically relevant’, which has traditionally meant using clinical samples. However, qualitative researchers are increasingly expanding this definition by focusing on non-clinical samples (Harper, 2008). It has been argued that understandings of adolescent development have been distorted by the generalisation of findings based on samples of psychologically disturbed teenagers to the population as a whole (Steinberg, 2001). Steinberg (2001) points out, for example, that notions of storm-and-stress have been widely assumed to be normative phases of developmental individuating processes, but studies with community samples have disputed the idea that adolescence is a time of inevitable conflict. Bucholtz (2002) also suggests that an emphasis on the ordinary, everyday activities and interactions in teenagers’ lives would provide an important balance to the more dramatic, sensationalist, ‘pathological’, or ‘deviant’ aspects of youth cultures that have typically attracted so much academic and media attention. In a similar vein, Gilligan (2000) believes that we may learn much from investigating ways that many young people actually thrive in spite of difficult circumstances, but that this would require a deliberate shift away from the usual focus of research and practice. My own research takes this up and shows that boys can enlighten us on the kinds of issues they find challenging, and on ways they understand and resolve problems and tensions in their everyday lives. Thus, I argue that this knowledge, gained from engaging directly with boys in the research process, is highly relevant for and applicable to clinical practice. It extends our focus beyond ‘damaged’ boys, and has the potential to significantly alter the way we approach, understand, and facilitate change in boys’ lives.
In recent decades, clinical psychological practice has seen an increasing application of constructionist approaches. This is not surprising, given the match between individual talk therapy and qualitative research based on semi-structured interviews. Helping
people in their struggle to enrich their interpersonal relationships has for a long time been a major component of psychotherapy. More recently, however, there has been a growing trend, especially in family systems work, towards facilitating the process of identity-creation by examining what is denied or enabled within particular cultural discourses (Frosh, 2002). Narrative approaches have been applied to psychotherapy, especially family therapy, whereby the therapist acts as facilitator and collaborator in the process of narrative (re)construction to help clients resolve problems by experimenting with alternative stories (Hiles & Cermak, 2008). By altering their stories, people are empowered to revise their identities and shift their positions. The therapeutic arena can provide space for the examination, disruption, and transformation of storied selves, and representations of others, which previously may have been based on unquestioned rationales, assumptions, and expectations. For instance, a deconstructive, narrative form of therapy may be a way into counter- discourses of gender and alternative renderings of masculinity (Frosh, 2002).
The ways that boys’ identities are conceptualised impacts significantly on approaches to mental health issues and clinical interventions. Therefore, it is critical that psychologists working with teenage boys continually reflect on ways that dominant discourses may structure and legitimise dominant models of assessment and therapy (Phillips, 2007). Pilkington (2007) proposes that ‘youth’ be understood as a set of cultural practices which young people enact, individually and collectively, as both responses to and strategies for negotiating and constructing their everyday social and structural contexts. Thus, when psychologists work with teenage boys, they should not view them, for example, as products of dysfunctional families, passive victims of peer pressure, or educational misfits. Nor should they be seen as “lost souls” helplessly floundering in the transitional void between childhood and adulthood (Pilkington, 2007). Rather, a culturally framed perspective of adolescence and of the experiences of teenage boys requires an understanding of the impact of cultural expectations and values on their lives (Compas et al., 1995). Central to this concept is the interrelatedness of multiple social contexts, including school, family, peer, and community networks.
I turn now to how clinical psychologists might meaningfully apply what we have learned from the boys who participated in this study. Gaining insight into how boys
construct and enact their multiple identities has the potential to generate novel and effective treatment approaches for addressing clinical issues. Given that teenage boys may be particularly susceptible to personal criticism and feelings of alienation, it makes sense for therapists to begin with an understanding of their world and the social context in which it has been constructed, before engaging in efforts to help them alter the way they think and behave (Furman, Jackson, Downey, & Shears, 2003). Furman et al. (2003) consider that the meanings that young people construct in their personal