The bottom line: Adolescent resistance strategies during the transition to high school

• In Event: Poster Session 14
  In Poster Session: PS 14 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

We explored the strategies that adolescents use to resist their parents in a sample of 26 adolescent-parent dyads (23 mother-adolescent, 3 father-adolescent) recruited from school boards in two Canadian urban centers. Adolescents (14 girls, 12 boys) who ranged in age from 12 to 14 were preparing to enter high school at the beginning of data collection. Data were collected through (1) observing two videorecorded conversations about 10 months apart and (2) video recall interviews. Video recall interviews were conducted with the parent and adolescent in separate rooms immediately after each conversation. The conversation topic introduced by the researcher was the adolescents’ leisure time but dyads conversed without the researcher present. Analysis of the conversational data involved content coding each turn of speech then integrating the analysis with the data from the video recall; the codes were organized into themes that fit with the data. Results revealed a range of goal-directed resistance strategies which can be grouped as follows: (a) withholding agreement (b) “messing with” parents (c) under-agreeing and (d) changing strategies. While resistance strategies remained consistent across the ten-month period, adolescents became more sophisticated in tailoring their strategies to their parents’ “bottom line”. Adolescents who expressed not feeling validated in the first interview used more aggressive strategies by the last and vice versa, suggesting an interactional nature of resistance strategy reinforcement. The strategies observed are characterized by adolescents’ efforts at relationship preservation and managing parents’ perceptions, and the use of past experiences and future expectations.

Authors

• Daniel Ji, University of British Columbia (UBC)
  Presenting Author

• Sheila Kathleen Marshall, University of British Columbia (UBC)
  Non-Presenting Author