The Culture of Adolescent Risk-Taking by Cynthia Lightfoot

The Culture of Adolescent Risk-Taking by Cynthia Lightfoot

This is an exploration of the relationship between adolesent risk-taking and peer group culture, based on interviews with teens themselves. The author shows how taking risks is a necessary and natural part of growing up and that risks are

What Cynthia Lightfoot has done in this groundbreaking book is first to ask adolescents why they take risks and then to listen thoughtfully to their answersShe refuses to see teenagers as accidents waiting to happen, as people who, under the influence of peers and hormones, lose all recourse to reason. She looks deeper and finds that teenagers do have their reasons: They know well that in this culture, our heroes are expected to take risks, risks that, if they survive, garner them wisdom, love, and fame (and a story to tell). By a thorough analysis of both her data and our own unspoken assumptions--about development, heroic narratives, and risk as play, Dr. Lightfoot shows us how adolescents creatively and dangerously set out to become the heroes of their own lives. The unique and important insight of this book is to remind us that such risks are taken for a positive purpose: It is only through testing the limits that adolescents discover their own. --Brian D. Cox, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology, Hofstra University

The combination of empirical research and deep analysis is a welcome departure from the traditional perspective that locates adolescent risk-taking as a 'social problem.' The author's data provide a basis for understanding risk-taking as a means of establishing and maintaining a social identity. Risk-taking as a `social problem' has in the past been constructed by adults; the accounts of risk-taking conduct revealed by adolescents tell stories of shaping, maintaining, and enhancing a sense of self in relation to others. The adolescents' own stories tell of risk-taking as a means of transforming identities on the way to adulthood. In preparation for the identity-transforming interpretation of adolescent risk-taking are chapters on 'the interpretive turn' and on 'play' that bring to bear in a fruitful way the contributions of Bakhtin, Vigotsky, Piaget, and Ricoeur, among others. --Theodore R. Sarbin, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Criminology, University of California, Santa Cruz
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Cynthia Lightfoot, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State University. Her professional publications and presentations focus principally on sociogenetic and interpretive approaches to human development, with special reference to adolescent peer culture and identity processes.

Foreword by Jaan Valsiner, Ph.D.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781572302327
ISBN 10	1572302321
Title	The Culture of Adolescent Risk-Taking
Author	Cynthia Lightfoot
Series	Culture And Human Development
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Guilford Publications
Year published	1997-07-02
Number of pages	187
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.