An Ongoing Research Project;
Chap Clark, PhD, Lead Researcher
The Hurt Project research, used as a significant contributor to this book, is driven by the data, results, conclusions, discussions, and limitations of an initial two-part study conducted by a research team and me from 2001 to early 2004, as well as the added data from the third phase (2004 – 10). The initial phase of the project was driven by the data discovered in my role as a substitute teacher from late 2001 to June 2002 at Crescenta Valley High School in the Glendale Unified School District using an ethnographic methodology known as participant observation. At the same time, our team conducted a thorough literature review of all relevant material, both popular and academic sources, that served to inform, shape, and nuance these observations and emerging perspectives. The second phase of the project, from the summer of 2002 to spring 2004, consisted of seventeen open-ended conversations with high school juniors and seniors in which I sought to gather a new batch of data giving texture and thickness to the observations and literature reviews previously utilized. This is what was reported in the first edition of the book Hurt: Inside the World of Today’s Teenagers. The continuing phase of the project is an ongoing synthesis of observation, interviews, open-ended conversations, and deliberate focus groups that provide additional data to the original results, pushing against conclusions that have changed or at least slightly morphed over the past several years, and more specifically focusing on populations and environments that the original study understudied.
While participant observation was the initial and motivating strategy used for the study, each supporting methodology we used was integrated in such a way as to bring out the most complete and robust picture of teenagers’ sense of their world and life. While there are a myriad of possible ways to investigate the general sense of adolescents’ perception of their reality, what is vital is that any methodology must be able to provide a relatively authentic and honest portrait of those being studied. As Paula Saukko notes, “The worth or validity of [a] project depends on how thoroughly and defensibly or correctly [it] has been done.”1
The data reported is the integration of a four-part research process: my role as participant observer in a high school, a literature review team investigating the issues that emerged from my observation, a series of conversations and focus groups, and an ongoing synthesis of observations, conversations, and focus groups, interaction with new scholarship, and a proactive commitment to dialogue with practitioners and scholars.
Perhaps the most fundamental question a social scientist can ask is, “How do we really know about a given population?” As the lead researcher in the Hurt Project, I have wrestled long and hard with this question for nearly a decade. As the world changes and widespread cultural trends increasingly demonstrate how these changes affect us all, this question is increasingly prompting scholars, albeit somewhat reluctantly for many, to move in a little closer to those who can teach the most about their world, in this case the adolescents themselves. Today’s teenagers have a great deal more to share than what we can often see and know through the more typical focus groups, questionnaires, or even personal interviews. Especially when studying adolescents, answers do not always remain consistent, and sometimes actual, on-the-street, lived-out beliefs and perspectives do not correlate with what they might say to a researcher.
To even begin to paint an accurate picture of the complex, multitiered world of today’s teenager, it takes someone who is outside of the constantly changing nature of adolescence to carefully listen, watch, ask, invite, and pursue.2 It takes someone who is close enough to get a well-rounded picture of what is going on but at the same time is considered safe enough to invite authentic and unfiltered behaviors and conversation. Patricia and Peter Adler, leading ethnographic scholars, affirm that participant observation is a most productive methodology for studying adolescent life and behavior, as they describe in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography: “Given ethnography’s strength of getting inside groups’ innerworkings, this methodology has been central to the exploration of how teenagers make sense of their social worlds.”3
The specific strategy I employed was to find a way to honor the agreement with the school and district to serve as a substitute teacher, while at the same time observing the students. I maintained the integrity of the role by following the directions the teacher had left regarding the class, and the co-principals and I agreed that the students (and faculty and administrators) should also be made aware of why I was there beyond substitute teaching. I would begin every class by explaining that I was on a lengthy sabbatical leave in order to listen to and observe the world of high school students and that I was planning to write a book about what I saw and heard. At the end of each day, I would record impressions — without using any names of students or even specific classes — of what I observed that day. At the end of each week I would synthesize my diary notes into a loose but comprehensive narrative, and then put the daily logs away. Within a few weeks, themes began to emerge, and I would allow myself to reflectively test out these emerging themes in my future daily observations.
During the semester-plus I was on campus, I received over a thousand unsolicited poems, notes, songs, and letters from students (and a few teachers). Later our team coded these texts (changing the names of students) and my observations, conversations, and preliminary conclusions to create a database. Kathy Charmaz suggests this type of data coding is an important aspect of the participant observer’s process in order to allow for various random materials to be integrated and synthesized. She writes, “Coding gives a researcher analytic scaffolding on which to build. Because researchers study their empirical materials closely, they can define both new leads from them and gaps in them. Each piece of data — whether an interview, a field note, a case study, a personal account, or a document — can inform earlier data.”4
While the Hurt Project initially relied on my work on a high school campus, we have also taken great care to align, or at least measure, our conclusions with relevant literature. Our commitment to a thorough interdisciplinary literature review, then, provides as much of a dynamic data set as any of the other forms of data collection we used. In participant observation, the literature review offers a grounding and boundarying structure that enables open-ended ethnographic inquiry while at the same time a place for contextualized analysis. The literature review is vital because it forces an ethnographic researcher to either position observations and conclusions within a previously delineated conceptual framework or, if necessary, push for a new way of thinking. This is what maintains ethnography in general and participant observation in particular as a bona fide and trustworthy social science methodology.5
In participant observation, the conceptual boundaries that literature provides, however, must not be allowed to shape ideas and perspectives before the observations themselves have bubbled to the surface of the researcher’s impressions. In other words, relevant literature should be used as a potential corrective to observations and conclusions that violate previous theoretical assumptions, not to a priori shape the impressions. Throughout both the initial study and the ongoing work of the Hurt study, that is how we have employed relevant literature and theory.
Focus groups and their research cousins, informal group conversations, have been shown to provide ethnographers with a wealth of insight not easily captured using other methods. First, even the most astute participant observer is able to see only snapshots of a given population, so a focus group will be able to fill in gaps.6 In addition, focus groups can help researchers avoid forming premature conclusions before having enough firsthand information.7 I found our procedure of adjusting conclusions according to the focus group comments to be vital to our overall understanding of this population. And last, the greatest value of the focus groups was the way the teenagers were able to “reveal unarticulated norms and normative assumptions”8 that in many cases I generally suspected but were made clear by the collective descriptive and corporate assent of the group participants. Thus throughout the entire project and since, we have utilized some form of small group interaction as a third primary source of data.
The groups were comprised of fifteen to twenty high school juniors and seniors and were chosen from at least three, and usually six to ten, population pools that were all geographically proximate.9 The cities and communities were chosen to represent a wide spectrum of US population centers and to represent a wide demographic as well — ethnic, urban, rural, suburban, and so on. (I also conducted two Canadian focus groups, one each on the east and west coast.) Before arriving in a city or town, I contacted at least two local nongovernmental agencies (and usually more) to enlist their help with contacting youth and youth-serving organizations to find potential subjects who were “articulate and willing to discuss with peers, many of whom they would not know, their impressions of the world they lived in, for a research project seeking to understand how teenagers perceive their life and world.” Each city ended up with a unique process, but our team was insistent on the following conditions: if at all possible, no more than three of the students would know each other well, no more than 50 percent could be actively involved in any single major category (sports team, church and/or religious youth organization, service club, etc.), the participants had to be available for a one-time sitting (including pizza), and a parent had to sign a release form. In most cases we followed up with a letter to each parent asking to reaffirm their willingness for their child to participate. In the years since the first edition, I have conducted between eight and fifteen similar conversations, with varying levels of formality.
The format of the groups was straightforward. We wanted to allow for perspectives to emerge without being shaped by the presence of the researcher or the way a question was asked. Therefore I came alone to almost every focus group and took notes sparingly, trying to stay true to the observation method by relying on my memory, except for direct or especially pithy quotes. In deciding how to facilitate the groups, we chose to err on the side of simplicity and openness by making statements like “Tell me about school” or “Discuss friends” (or dating or family or pressure). Once the teens achieved a level of safety with each other, usually within the first thirty to forty-five minutes, the most important work I had to do was to avoid groupthink, times when the discussion appeared to be swelling into too clean of a uniformity. The research on how facilitators can avoid groupthink is well documented, and prevention of groupthink is a relatively easily accessed skill set, employing strategies like inviting a quiet person to answer a relatively unrelated question, or by reintroducing or redirecting words one subject has used that would contradict the direction the group was headed.10 This proved not to be a problem with any of the groups.
As stated, the work of the Hurt Project was not complete with the release of the book. As a graduate school professor, I have continued to enlist students and graduates to investigate a wide range of literature, to ask ethnographic questions while in the field, and to personally work with and consult organizations and communities that seek to do a better job understanding and serving teenagers. Our teams have chosen to see this research as an ongoing inquiry and to report what is seen and heard in the natural course of networks and relationships, as opposed to formalizing the project by means of a committee, grant, or institutional project. Instead, for example, when a private school invites me (or a member of my team) to spend time on their campus observing and interviewing students and faculty to determine the level and places of systemic abandonment, we operate under the guidelines of the institution and authority of their board of directors. When given the opportunity to conduct focus groups, we do insist, as we have from the beginning, on parental consent, but for the most part we observe and operate under the auspices of the inviting party.
Finally, the reason we have continued this project, and will continue this project for years to come, is that what was discovered in writing the original book Hurt is not improving. The level of responsibility and competencies11 required of children from very early ages has risen exponentially over the past decade, and yet the ongoing adult support and guidance offered to them without a self-serving agenda has diminished at roughly the same rate. We are convinced that children and teenagers have never experienced less social capital than they do today and that they experience more stress than any generation in history. We stand with a growing group of people who are committed to raising the flag of awareness, conversation, and action so that our children, and their children, will grow up in a world where they are known, loved, and cherished.