Contemporary Teenagers Research Articles

Zainteresowanie tekstami o tematyce dystopicznej i postapokaliptycznej wśród uczniów w wieku gimnazjalnym


 Cel badań Celem badania było rozpoznanie tych zainteresowań czytelniczych nastolatków, które odnoszą się do tekstów kultury o tematyce postapokaliptycznej i dystopicznej. Wychodząc od założeń dotyczących popularności tego typu fabuł (Czaja, Głażewski, Nijaszewski, Polak) poprzez odniesienia do zagadnień dotyczących kultury popularnej i kultury medialnej (Wałaszewski, Melosik, Krajewski) oraz kwestię funkcjonowania w społeczeństwie współczesnym (Giddens, Appadurai), Autorka relacjonuje i omawia uczniowskie wskazania i refleksje, zebrane podczas badania ankietowego. Poczynając od teoretycznego ujęcia fascynacji fabułami postapokaliptycznymi i dystopicznymi, teksty kultury omówione zostały pod kątem ich oddziaływania na uczniów nastoletnich, osadzenia współczesnego adolescenta w kulturze konwergencji oraz potencjału dydaktycznego zaproponowanych przez uczniów tytułów.
 Metoda
 Przedmiotem rozważań staną się w głównej mierze wyniki badania ankietowego, przeprowadzonego wśród 59 nastoletnich respondentów na początku roku 2017 podczas współorganizowanych przez Autorkę lekcji warsztatowych. Część pierwsza ankiety wymagała od uczniów podania tytułów znanych im utworów postapokaliptycznych i dystopicznych pochodzących kolejno z książek, filmów i gier komputerowych oraz wskazania tych cech fabularnych, które respondenci uznali za najbardziej interesujące. Część druga pozwoliła uczniom na zaprezentowanie swojego stanowiska w dwóch kwestiach: powodu, dla którego polecają rówieśnikom tego typu pozycje oraz powodu, dla którego, ich zdaniem, powinny one wybrzmieć jako kontekst podczas lekcji języka polskiego (Janus-Sitarz, Nowak).
 Wyniki
 Autorka, na podstawie uczniowskich odpowiedzi, uwypukla cechy odbioru tekstów kultury przez współczesnych nastolatków. Zwraca również uwagę na zagadnienia, które porusza literatura postapokaliptyczna i dystopiczna, a które stają się dla uczniów ważne i wymagające uwzględnienia również w dydaktyce przedmiotowej.
 Wnioski
 Obecne w tego typu literaturze połączenie uniwersalnych problemów jednostki z niebezpieczeństwem związanym z funkcjonowaniem we współczesnym świecie, pozwala na kontekstowe odniesienia, może stanowić przyczynek do dyskusji i debat w klasie, uruchamia również możliwość kształcenia u uczniów krytycznej interpretacji tekstu.

Interaksi Virtual Remaja Di Media Sosial

The study is titled " Virtual Interaction of Teen on Social Media". The purpose of this study was to find out the meaning of Facebook social media for adolescents as a medium of communication in the virtual world, how teenagers express themselves through social media and show the symbol of virtual interacting contemporary teen-age.  The theory in this study is the symbolic interaction with the methodology of virtual ethnography. Techniques of determining informants using snowball technique that is through the recommendation of facebook users among adolescents aged 15-18 Years in Cilegon City. Data collection techniques are done by direct observation, in-depth interviews, and documentation. While virtual ethnographic observations are done online and offline. Online observations of researchers interact with resource persons in social media, offline researchers face to face with sources. Triangulation of sources is used in the technique of data validity. The results of this study's first teenage interpreting Facebook as an entertainment, interaction and media interaction in the virtual world. Second, teenagers can express themselves through the status update activity with slang, upload photos with "contemporary" pose and intensity of interaction by chatting to forget the time, and the dependence of updates in social media facebook.

Influence of Parental messages on the aggressiveness of teenagers

Aim. The aim of the study is to find what Parental messages (PM) modern Bulgarian teenagers receive in the process of important social and cultural changes in the post-totalitarian society and which ones are ‘responsible’ for the growing aggression in and outside schools. The Parental Messages are statements to the younger generation made by the parents that are transmitted in the socio-psychic and the sociocultural space as undisputable rules, pieces of wisdom and values, i.e. they form both the content of the Parent Ego state and the sociocultural Parent governing the behaviour and the attitude of the people.
 Methods. We chose 64 commonly known in the Bulgarian sociocultural space statements which were presented to 284 teenagers aged 14-18 to find out what messages the contemporary teenagers receive from their parents. Then we chose 40 of the teenagers and in addition we tested them with the Buss-Durkee inventory. The Parental messages received by the aggressive and the non-aggressive teenagers were compared.
 Results. The study found significant differences in the Parental messages received by the two groups which is a premise for different content of the Parent Ego state and different behavior of the two groups.
 Conclusions. The results obtained so far lead to the conclusion that the Parental messages the aggressive adolescents were given from their parents in childhood and continue to be given during adolescence take the form of the content of the Parent Ego state and in this case a Parent who is able to directly realise itself in aggressive behaviour because this is the behaviour which is ‘allowed’ by the parents (mainly by the fathers). Parents teach their children to be aggressive, though they are not likely to fully realise that.
 Originality. A study with the author’s own methodology (questionnaire about the Parental Messages) was conducted among teenagers and the results were compared to the results from the Buss-Durkey inventory.

Направленность самоосуществления и личностное развитие подростка

The authors ground the necessity to clarify the terminological and phenomenological specifics of the terms: “self-fulfillment”, “personal development”, “self-development”. The attention is drawn to the formal usage of these terms in the pedagogical science and the ambiguous interpretations by different scientific schools of psychology. The research of the manifestation of self-fulfillment and personal development is performed based on a selection of 126 teenagers, engaging the “Personal growth” scales from the methods of psychological well-being by C. Ryff, the “Personal growth” scales from the methods of “Life aspirations” by E.Deci, R.Ryan, as well as the author’s method of directivity to self-fulfillment and method to reveal the significance by V.Y, Kotlyakov. For the first time the authors’ questionnaire to measure the self-development in different life spheres is employed. The analysis of the empirical results allows to make a grounded statement that the contemporary teenagers have a prevailing egocentric directivity of self-fulfillment and reveals as well the importance of the interest to the moral aspects of being and the interiorized values of personal growth for the harmonious self-fulfillment of the teenager.

Сравнителен анализ на реален и виртуален аз в тийнейджърска възраст

Communication in a modern world tolerates revolution through new digital technologies and is now almost entirely projected into a parallel digital world. Social networks change the trajectory of interpersonal relationships. Looking at human development, a student nowadays spends much longer time in the virtual reality up to the time they become adults. He/She designs his / her personal characteristics by creating his / her parallel, virtual self. Freedom in virtual reality is a prerequisite for a person to present himself as he is or to the extend of social desirability. This research compares and analyzes the real and virtual personality of contemporary teenagers and looks for correlations between them.

Strengths among Contemporary Teenagers: A Comparative Study

Male and female are two indispensible wheels of a chariot, thus both complement each other and this is a fact that without any one of them, it is just impossible to imagine the smooth continuation of the journey of life. India is a country where women were worshiped as Goddess. Though the society in which we live has been shaped historically by males. But recently the existing scenario appears to be changing with the realization of strengths among females. A harmonious society appears to be emerging with the fast speed of decline in gender-specificity. In order to empirically confirm these notions, the present researchers decided to explore and compare the profile of strengths of male-female adolescents. A test of Hindi adaptation of Value In Action (VIA) Inventory of Strengths for Youth by Shree and Singh (2013) was used. A purposive sample of 150 adolescents in which 75 were males and 75 were females with the age range of 13-17 years was drawn from Rohtak city, Haryana. The descriptive statistics was used to find out the mean differences in strengths of male and female adolescents. They differed to some extent in their profile of signature strengths. Further the profile of top five strengths also called “signature strengths”, the male and female differed in two out of five signature strengths. The similar signature strengths found in both male and female adolescents were such as judgment/critical thinking, appreciation of beauty and love, however they differed on two strengths such as zest and perspective were found in male while kindness and modesty were found in female. The inference drawn from the current study is that females are more humane than the male counterpart whereas males are found to be more courageous than females. The need to foster or enhance certain strengths in specific gender are discussed in the paper.

自我接纳：心理健康的应有之义

自我接纳是指个体在认识自己的基础上，对现实自我及其相关特征主动认可和乐意接受的态度。它是一种复杂的心理现象，具有非依附性、非回避性、非评判性和自愿等多种特性。自我接纳对个体健康自我的养成、对情绪适应性和社会适应性的提升都有着促进作用。从发展的角度看，自我接纳是自我改变的先导。为最大发挥自我接纳在维护个体身心健康、促进自我成长方面的积极功能，个体应正确理解和实践认识自己、接纳自己、改变自己以及这三者之间的关系。未来研究应探讨自我接纳的中西方文化差异，并着重对我国当代中学生自我接纳特点进行考察，以期为其自我接纳品质的养成提供建议。 Self-acceptance is the attitude that one accepts the real self and its characteristics positively and willingly, which is on the basis of self-knowledge. It is a complex psychological phenomenon that possesses multiple properties: nonattachment, nonavoidance, nonjudgment and willingness. Empirical studies have shown that self-acceptance can contribute to developing the health self and strengthening the ability of emotional adaptation as well as social adaptation. From the development point of view, self-acceptance is the leader of self-change. In order to maximize the function of self-acceptance about maintaining mental health and promoting self-growth, individuals should correctly understand and deal with the relationship between knowing themselves, accepting themselves, changing themselves. Future research could investigate the cultural difference between China and the west of self-acceptance and explore the characteristics of Chinese contemporary teenagers’ self-acceptance. Then, practical advices will be provided for their cultivation of self-acceptance.

Needs Analysis of the Students of the 3d Class of Junior High School

This paper seeks to explore whether English language learning is viewed as an accumulation of language skills merely for the acquisition of a foreign language certificate, which is the commonly held view regarding English language instruction in Greece, or Junior High School learners would wish to have a more holistic view of foreign language learning in the context of a challenging multicultural environment. The research was conducted in a Greek state school of a rural area and renders significant results as to the shift of focus from traditional views regarding English language teaching in Greece to what contemporary teenagers would like to accomplish through foreign language instruction provided by the state. The paper ultimately identifies the needs of Junior High School learners regarding English language instruction through the use of a questionnaire and discusses the implications of the findings for the amendment of the existing teaching materials to the benefit of the learners.

Social Media and Changes in the Language of Polish and Korean Youth

Currently, quick and profound changes occur in the sphere of language. The reasons for this are frequent and longterm interactions of the contemporary teenagers with social media, such as: Facebook, My Space, Flickr, online computer games and virtual realities, such as Club Penguin, Second Life and the Sims; websites collecting videos and pictures, such as YouTube; blogs (e.g. blogger, microblogger, Twitter), as well as the use of mobile telephony and smartphones, namely mobile phones and pocket computers, including iPod touch – a multifunctional computer with access to the Internet or iPhone – being a combination of a mobile phone with an entertainment platform and online messenger, as well as email. The aforementioned media offer teenagers a place to meet and quickly communicate with each other, and this phenomenon is growing exponentially. Social media encourage to experiment with language in order for everyday language to better reflect reality. This results, to a great extent, in depletion of language of the youth, simplification and introduction of new codes. This article is an attempt to describe this “new” language of Polish and Korean youth, as well as answer the following questions: Do the analyzed changes threaten the Polish and Korean language identity and orthography? Have English phrases become a permanent code of communication between teenagers in the two countries?

Teachers' stories: physical education teachers' constructions and experiences of masculinity within secondary school physical education

ABSTRACTPhysical education (PE) and sport have traditionally been identified by scholars as a key mechanism for the production and reproduction of a culturally esteemed ideal of masculinity, premised upon being stoic, strong, competitive, sexist and homophobic. Yet, more recent research reflects a change in valued masculinity as a response to declining cultural homohysteria. As such, this preliminary study looks to establish how PE teachers understand and construct masculinities within the educational environment. Through in-depth interviews, we find participants recognised many elements of softer masculinities, described in inclusive masculinities literature, as being performed by contemporary teenagers. This includes being emotionally open, embracing a more effeminate taste in dress and being increasingly physically tactile. However, we also found that the PE teachers have a cohort variance in their masculine values, with those socialised in sport through the 1980s showing the most orthodox and oppressive views.

‘It's just drama’: teen perspectives on conflict and aggression in a networked era

Contemporary youth conflict often plays out through social media like Facebook and Twitter. ‘Drama’ is an emergent concept describing performative, interpersonal conflict that takes place in front of an active, engaged audience, often on social media. Using ethnographic data, this paper examines how American teenagers conceptualize the term drama; the relationship between drama and social media; and the implications drama has for understanding contemporary teenage conflict. The emic use of drama distances teens from practices conceptualized by adults as bullying or relational aggression, while acknowledging the role of the audience in social media interactions. Drama also serves to reinforce the conventional gendered norms of high school, perpetrating the systemic undervaluing of feminine subjects and re-inscribing heteronormativity. Understanding how drama operates helps illuminate how widespread use of social media among teenagers has altered dynamics of aggression and conflict.

Czy fajny jest fajny? Współczesne leksemy młodzieżowe o znaczeniu ‘taki, który mi się (bardzo) podoba’

Is fajny ‘cool’ cool? Modern teenage lexemes meaning ‘such that I like (a lot)’
 The paper examines the functioning of a very numerous group of lexemes synonymous to the adjective fajny ‘such that I like (a lot)’, which can be found in the language of contemporary teenagers, e.g. fajowy, super, spoko, cool, słit (sweet), odjazdowy, wypasiony, epicki, zajebisty, zacny. It analyses the conditions and methods used to multiply this category of lexemes in the teenage slang – which has these days a powerful impact on general Polish. The points of reference are the phenomena characteristic of slang: expressiveness, fashion, richness of synonyms and tautonyms. These questions are considered against the background of current cultural and linguistic changes (structural processes, borrowing, colloquialization, vulgarization and devulgarization, word play).

Stres, przemiany tożsamości i konsumeryzm — wyzwania współczesnej młodzieży

Every day, contemporary youngsters face limitations and exploit the possibilities offered by the global reality. The conditions which characterise the beginning of the 21st century are vastly different from the times in which their parents and grandparents grew up. It would be futile to look for any kind of order in the world today, be it political, moral or economic one. The young, who experience temporariness and constant change, have to develop their own measures of coping with post-modern challenges. The principal issue presented in this paper is the occurrence of information and relational stress. The fast pace of local migration, the overload of information, the weakening of social bonds and the relationships lasting “here and now” are the shameful markers of the lifestyle of young people. These are also constitutive traits which distinguish contemporary teenagers from their predecessors. In the subsequent section, the author considers excessive consumption as a modern form of cult. Finally, attention is drawn to the incoherent and continually evolving identity of individuals, who seek to determine their place within the contemporary social structures.

Swagger, Ratings and Masculinity: Theorising the Circulation of Social and Cultural Value in Teenage Boys’ Digital Peer Networks

This paper seeks to disrupt sensationalist racialised and classed media accounts of the youth looting in the 2011 London riots. It draws upon research on young people's uses of mobile digital technology, including social networking sites like Facebook and Blackberry Messenger to understand the performance of contemporary teenage masculinities. Developing the work of Beverly Skeggs, we demonstrate how value circulates in young people's digital peer networks. We analyse how images of designer goods and labels that signify wealth are used on social networking sites to embody cool masculine ‘swagger’ and attain popularity ‘ratings’, which we theorise as forms of social and cultural capital that circulate in the peer networks. Interview narratives also illustrate that the construction of online value must be verified in boys’ offline lives; and we show how teenage boys are negotiating power relationships and peer hierarchies online, at school and in their neighbourhoods. We argue that an analysis of symbolic value in digital contexts and in embodied everyday life helps in understanding new regulative formations of gender and masculinity in late-modern, globalised contexts of youth identity construction. In this way, our findings and analysis directly challenge the simplistic public discourses of ‘feral’ and ‘mindless’ youthful masculinities depicted in the UK media representations of the London riots, providing more complex insights into the construction of contemporary teenage masculinities.

‘I don’t wanna be anything other than me’: A case study on gender representations of teenagers in American teen drama series One Tree Hill

Economic and demographic trends have turned young people into a target audience, and media producers and the marketing industry have realized that the contemporary teenage market has substantial potential. Television is still the most popular medium among teenagers; along with web surfing and social networking, television is part of teens’ daily media use. Media content is essential in teenagers’ self-representation: fictional media programmes produce commodified meanings, and models of behaviour and information about norms and values are repetitively delivered by attractive characters in the form of entertainment. This article gives an overview of the gender representations of teenagers in the American teen series by Schwahn One Tree Hill (2003–2012) by using a qualitative thematic textual analysis. We can say that the series revolves around a male-oriented world in which basketball is the main topic. Teen subcultures are often portrayed in a prototypical manner and traditional discourses of masculinity and femininity are often rein-forced. A more liberal stance was noted regarding (female) sexuality.

Mad Girls’ Love Songs: Two Women Poets—a Professor and Graduate Student—Discuss Sylvia Plath, Angst, and the Poetics of Female Adolescence

The legacy of Sylvia Plath’s poetry and the received notion of the teenage girl writer wallowing in self-pity are discussed in terms of their significance to adolescent female readers and their ramifications for girlhood culture at large. Plath’s legacy endures in part because of the recognition that a fluctuation in moods and personas is often the experience of young women, of writers, of those who struggle with depression or anxiety (and the overlap between these populations), and also because of Plath’s ability to craft the fever of her emotions into poems that rely on bold and rich figurative language. This essay uses memoir, a survey of Plath’s popular and critical reception, and a close reading of Plath poems that take on more adolescent concerns and themes, then concludes by looking at contemporary women poets whose aesthetics, attitudes and themes are relevant to contemporary teenage girl readers.

Are Teens “Post-Gay”? Contemporary Adolescents’ Sexual Identity Labels

Recent reports suggest that historically typical sexual identity labels-"gay," "lesbian" and "bisexual"-have lost meaning and relevance for contemporary adolescents. Yet there is little empirical evidence that contemporary teenagers are "post-gay." In this brief study we investigate youths' sexual identity labels. The Preventing School Harassment survey included 2,560 California secondary school students administered over 3 years: 2003-2005. We examined adolescents' responses to a closed-ended survey question that asked for self-reports of sexual identity, including an option to write-in a response; we content analyzed the write-in responses. Results suggest that historically typical sexual identity labels are endorsed by the majority (71%) of non-heterosexual youth. Some non-heterosexual youth report that they are "questioning" (13%) their sexual identities or that they are "queer" (5%); a small proportion (9%) provided alternative labels that describe ambivalence or resistance to sexual identity labels, or fluidity in sexual identities. Our results show that lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities remain relevant for contemporary adolescents.

Chinks in the Merged Attachment: Generational Bequests to Contemporary Teenage Girls

This article suggests the ways in which feminism's demands on the culture are reshaping the relationships of teenage girls to one another and their self experience. It addresses the newly observed capacity of girls to apparently break out of the monolith of merged attachments and show evidence for aspects of differentiation. It argues that aspects of the mother's ambition for a daughter's success are, however, being internalized in ways that unintentionally reproduce aspects of a prefeminist merged mother-daughter relationship. It argues that the so-called postfeminist moment is producing a notion that girls can have it all, but a continuing and stable sense of self that can manage such complexity and multiple desires is often lacking.

Prevalence and trends of underweight and BMI distribution changes in Japanese teenagers based on the 2001 National Survey data

Background: Excessive thinness has been glamorized among Japanese adolescent girls, and unhealthy dieting to lose weight has become a popular practice among them. The prevalence of underweight in contemporary Japanese girls in comparison with that of boys, however, remains to be studied.Aim: The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence and trends of underweight in contemporary Japanese teenagers of both sexes using nationally representative cross-sectional data.Subjects and methods: Underweight was defined as BMI < 3rd percentile by age and sex of the 1978–1981 reference population as previously reported. These reference values were compared with BMIs of the contemporary population based on the 2001 Cross-sectional National Survey data of Japanese teenagers (215 972 boys and 216 496 girls).Results: The prevalence of underweight was approximately 2–3% in junior high school students of both sexes, 12.5–14.5 years of age, approximately 3% in senior high school students of both sexes, 15.5–16.5 years of age, and approximately 4% in senior high school students of both sexes, 17.5 years of age.Conclusion: The prevalence of underweight decreased among Japanese teenage students of both sexes during the past decades. Female preponderance in the prevalence of underweight was not confirmed.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp (review)

Reviewed by: The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp Karen Coats Yancey, Rick The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp. Bloomsbury, 2005339p ISBN 1-58234-693-3$16.95 R* Gr. 5-8 When Alfred Kropp's uncle approaches Alfred with a scheme to get rich simply by stealing a sword from a building where Uncle Farrell is the night watchman, Alfred knows it will turn out badly but goes along nonetheless. The sword is in fact Excalibur, the weapon that can heal as well as kill and that renders its wielder invincible. Mogart, who commissioned the theft, kills Alfred's uncle and then proceeds to kill all but one of the remaining knights (descendants of the original knights of Arthur's Round Table) who have sworn to protect the sword. Bennacio, the last knight, finds Alfred, who begs to be allowed to go with Bennacio to try to recover the sword and thus atone for his theft. Alfred is, of course, an unlikely hero, surprising no one so much as himself as he finds the fortitude to continue his quest despite the horrific violence he meets at every turn. Yancey's genius here lies in the felicitous juxtaposition of the magnificent, almost sacred, nature of the quest and the mundanity of Alfred's approach to it. Alfred is as aware of his moral and intellectual failings as was T. H. White's Lancelot (from whose line, it turns out, he descends), but whereas Lancelot's self-deprecation is tragic, Alfred's is by turns touching and funny. Set against Bennacio's dignity and single-mindedness, Alfred's very contemporary teenage sensibility keeps reality squarely at the center of this otherworldly adventure: "Maybe my destiny was to be the sword-wielding savior of the world, and wouldn't that just make Amy Pouchard regret not giving me her cell phone number!" The grim, ragged humor of Alfred's narration actually serves to strengthen the gravity of emotion and tragedy that haunts the narrative—with the death of Bennacio, one is left with the sense that a great idea has left the world, along with the power to realize it. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois