Social Scientific Expertise and the Adolescent of Modernity: International Diagnoses and Local Adjustments – Post War Australia

• In Event: How Processes of Science Create and Lose Sight: Paradoxes of Research’s Desire for Remedy, Repair, and Renewal

Abstract

This paper explores shifting expert knowledge and research techniques for knowing the adolescent and the gendered student and future citizen, the bearers of modernity, linked here to perceived concerns in managing the temporalities of leisure and work. It draws on a genealogy of youth studies in Australia since the 1950s – this decade saw the expansion of secondary schooling in Australia (Murray 1957; Ramsay 1960) and a corresponding flourishing interest in diagnosing and documenting the life and character of the adolescent (Campbell and Sherington 2006). Significant shifts in conceptions of adolescence, and in their norms of conduct and aspirations, are evident in subsequent decades, often paralleling wider international moves in psychological and sociological thinking. A series of comparative studies in the 1950s (supported by Carnegie funding) CER during the 1950s on The Adjustment of Youth in the US, Australia and the UK (Australian Council for Educational Research 1951), designated adolescence as a ‘social problem’ and drew on the language of social psychology to explain the influences upon and inter and intra-subjective conflicts faced by adolescents as well as the challenges facing schools in educating them. The influential educationalist, W.F. Connell’s mixed-methods study, Growing up in Australian City: A study of adolescents in Sydney (Connell 1959), was both formed in and responded to this context. Through a series of questionnaires and interviews over a 5-year period in the mid 1950s, 8,705 respondents (representing close to 10% of Sydney’s adolescent population at that time) addressed themes that then beset social psychology – adjustment, learning of appropriate roles, emotional stability, intellectual achievement. This paper 1) examines constructions of and concerns about the modern adolescent, interrogating the claims of international authority and national mediations; and 2) analyses the methodological techniques and expertise that were brought to bear in generating social scientific knowledge and norms about the nature and adjustments of adolescence.

Author

• Julie E. McLeod, University of Melbourne