Adaptation and resistance in adolescence: A case study of teenagers imagining adulthood

Abstract

To ask young people about their prospects of life and ideas of their future is quite common within in the field of Western youth research. For many years, the usually quantitative studies show that - at least in Germany - many adolescents seem to be rather pragmatic and very well adjusted to the expectations of mainstream society. Such results regularly lead to both relief and disappointment. Politicians are relieved, for such outcomes seem to imply neither an oncoming uprising nor the necessity for social changes. Researchers, on the other hand, are rather disappointed because the Western conceptions of youth and adolescence postulate and demand a certain resistance against and challenging of the worlds of adults through the young generation. When we got the first results from our own, qualitative and cross-cultural, study in which we asked children and young people - especially in Ghana and Germany - to imagine their lives as adults we actually felt disappointed, too. In interviews and essays, the German participants - on whom we will focus here - expressed no worries, irritations, or dissatisfaction, and no resistance to social conditions, with the exception of some criticism of school and school learning. Particularly relevant, their essays revealed almost standardized life plans centered on choosing a career, engaging in everyday work, starting a family, building a house, enjoying leisure time, and traveling. Instead of complaining about today's youth we took our disappointment as a source for challenging our own assumptions about youth and adolescence and for a deeper analysis of the data. In this paper, we will, first, reflect on the extent to which adaptation and resistance is particularly characteristic of adolescence and whether it involves political resistiveness. Second, we analyze those few examples in our German sample that - at least on the manifest level - resist rather than conform to social expectations and norms of a "good" future. By reconstructing the latent meanings behind this manifest resistiveness, we work out its modus operandi thereby drawing on Klaus Holzkamp's distinction between restrictive and generalized agency. Finally, we discuss the significance of these findings for youth research.