How do youth make sense of interpersonal interactions and resolve conflicts with diverse groups?
Item
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Title
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How do youth make sense of interpersonal interactions and resolve conflicts with diverse groups?
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:2c08d4e54e34:11368
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identifier
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11758
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Creator
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Lucic, Luka,
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Contributor
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Colette Daiute
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Social psychology | Sociolinguistics | Development of Youth | Divesity | Narrative Inquiry | Relational Flexibility | Space-Time Compression
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Abstract
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Building upon recent work that defines cognitive development as a continuous process of sense-making situated within a cultural and historical context this dissertation explores how youth growing up in New York City develop relational-flexibility, defined as a context-sensitive extension of perspective-taking enacted in narrative and discourse in interactions with culturally diverse peers. The theoretical basis for this study is that children and youth develop through interpersonal interactions as they enter and attempt to make sense of new communities of minds broadly defined in this work as groups of people gathered together by participation in joint cultural activities. Seen from this perspective, contemporary youth---growing up in large and diverse American cities---develop in a socio-cultural context which is radically different from the socio-cultural context that shaped the development of youth 20, 30 or even 10 years ago. This difference is, I argue, produced by increasing diversity and by the phenomenon known as the 'time-space compression' of their social life.;The study examines how immigrant and U.S. born youth, developing alongside one another in an hyper-diverse context such as New York City, enact relational-flexibility as they construct projective narratives in order to make sense of interactions with diverse others in situations involving technologically mediated interpersonal interactions. Forty-four youth (ages 15--19) were involved in a quasi-experimental research condition and asked to answer three questions in response to a vignette depicting a slightly ambiguous text-messaging (SMS) interaction between two non-gendered individuals. Given the confluence of factors involved in increasing diversity and time-space compression of social life with plausible effects on cognitive development, the following questions are addressed in this study: How do youth growing up in an increasingly multicultural U.S. society, manage to make sense of their diverse interpersonal interactions? To what extent do they develop and enact relational flexibility in narratives and discourse with their culturally diverse peers?;Narrative construction of projective writing in response to questions aimed to engage the process of sense-making was analyzed using a well-known socio-linguistic narrative analysis scheme and focused, in particular, on the evaluative function in narrative. Findings indicate that immigrant youth have a greater range of relational flexibility then do their U.S. born peers. Immigrant youth use the functions of causation, logic and hypothetical reasoning significantly more frequently when attempting to make sense of interactions with members of their own culture than they do when attempting to make sense of bi-cultural interpersonal interactions with their U.S. born peers. Conversely, significantly higher use of affective linguistic devices in the process of sense-making by U.S. born youth scaffolds the use of affective discourse by immigrant youth who, over time, adopt that discursive strategy while maintaining another in relation to other immigrant youth.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Psychology
