Abstract
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.