Från tonårstjej till ung kvinna : : En studie om skapande av mening med icke accepterat tjejbeteende under tonårstiden

Sammanfattning: My interest for the meaning of risk behaviour over time was triggered during my job as a social worker. My work environment brought me in contact with young teenage girls who spent time on the streets and in town squares with older boys who often were criminals or drug users. People in these girls surroundings were concerned about the girls lives on the streets, which resulted in the girls being reported to the social authorities. In this thesis I return to the five young women that I researched in my Master s thesis. They were then strategically chosen to represent risk behaviour in teenage girls. This study is a 10-year follow-up study. The follow-up study is retrospective and aims to investigate how these teenage girls, who are now young women, viewed their development from the time of their adolescence to their current age. The study is mainly qualitative in it s design and approaches the field from two theoretical perspectives: the narrative and the salutogenic. A narrative analysis is based upon in-depth interviews with open-ended questions that encourage story-telling, while the basis for the analysis is turning points that are integrated into the structure of the narrative. The narratives were typologized on the basis of how the young women positioned themselves in the story and show how they describe their development over time. The young women also completed Antonovky s questionnaire KASAM 29. The questionnaire measures an individual s sense of coherence and examines where a person sees herself at the time of the rating. The study s narrative results show three types of narratives: three progressive, one mixed and one stable regressive (Gergen & Gergen, 1988). Further, the results show that a behaviour not accepted for girls can be explained 10 years later as resistance strategies in difficult life situations that are necessary for a new identity as an independent young woman. These results are similar to what Robinsson (1994) defined as temporary powerlessness , which means that when the young women took control of their lives by avoiding an unhealthy life situation, their life stories changed directions. In addition, the result of the SOC questionnaire is in this study viewed as a construction and the responses were analysed in relation to the narrative, which contributed to a more in-depth analysis and method triangulation (Patton, 1990). The study concludes that risk behaviour in a difficult life situation can be seen as strategies of resistance and as temporary powerlessness ; a necessity in the search for a new identity as an independent young woman. By changing perspective from a problem-based view of the girls behaviour and instead investigate what their behaviour may express and what this means for their development in the long run, we can learn something new. We can learn about the intrinsic context of resilience, which will benefit those young women we meet. These young women are not victims, but rather active subjects who have formed their lives based on the living space made available to them.