“I Just Want to Work Hard”

Setting and Participants

This article draws from data from an ethnographic study of ICT use among thirteen 12th graders attending an urban public high school in the Northeast. It focuses on three participants for several reasons. The three were among those who spend the most time using ICT, and each used a variety of technological tools, in connection with a particular domain of activity. This provided examples of multiple types of ICT use as related to domain-specific self-efficacy beliefs, as highlighted in the literature. Although the three participants’ levels of ICT use were higher than most in the study, they appear typical of many youth (Grisso & Weiss, 2005; Schofield Clark, 2005; Selwyn, 2006). In addition, each demonstrated seemingly contradictory self-efficacy-related beliefs, which I examined to build a more complex understanding of how their beliefs and actions were related to their ICT use. Last, focusing on three cases enabled me to present more in-depth and contextualized examinations of the complexities ICT use in participants’ lives, as consistent with the methodological approach of the study.

Data Collection

Data for this study were collected from August 2003 to June 2004. Three in-depth interviews, lasting between 45 minutes to 1 hour, were conducted with each participant, in which they described their uses of electronic technologies and their understandings of those uses, as related to contextual factors, including their relationships with school personnel, peers, and family. I also observed participants in multiple settings, including homes, classrooms, libraries, and other public spaces, to get a holistic sense of their technology-mediated activities. In doing so, I observed, first hand, the products (blogs, websites, and other creative works) about which they spoke. During these observations we engaged in informal discussions about their activities. Consistent with the qualitative methodology, I sought to understand “the lived daily world from subjects’ own perspectives” (Kvale, 1996, p. 27) and “how differing structures produced the events observed” (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 4).

The focus on participants’ perspectives in combination with the intensity and scope of data collection led to trusting relationships between me and the participants. I began the study by simply “hanging out” with them at school. As they came to know me personally and to understand the centrality of their perceptions to my investigation, they shared the broader contexts of their lives through narrative and by inviting me to out-of-school spaces, customarily reserved for friends and peers. That I took seriously their experiences, opinions, and stories strengthened their perceptions of me as a trustworthy confidante. The relationships I developed with participants put me in a unique position to understand the significance of ICT use in the broader context of their everyday lived experiences.

This study has several limitations. First, due to the small sample, the findings cannot be generalized to all youth and or to ICT use, more generally. Furthermore, electronic technologies and the purposes for which they are used are rapidly evolving. This study does not attempt to isolate the effects of particular ICT uses on participants’ self-efficacy beliefs, which could prove useful in further understanding how their positive influences might be transferred to other domains such as academic domains. In this study, what emerged as significant to participant’s self-efficacy beliefs was how they were able to use a variety of technologies in connection with their own interests and desires.

In examining differences in participants’ self-efficacy beliefs in different domains, relationships with teachers and parents were significant. However, the study did not include interviews with these adults. Such interviews would likely have provided valuable insights into why participants did not seem to experience or demonstrate strong self-efficacy beliefs in the school and family contexts. Again, particularly regarding the issue of transference, further studies should examine more closely how and why key adults might both limit and enhance young people’s opportunities to develop strong self-efficacy through ICT use. Despite this limitation, the nature and richness of the data is appropriate to the study which seeks to examine how the participants themselves understand the significance of ICT use in their lives.

Procedures and Analysis

All data were converted to text files; interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, and notes from observations and informal discussions were typed up in narrative form. The text files were uploaded into AtlasTI, a qualitative data analysis software package used to organize, code, and retrieve data, and an initial list of largely inductive codes was developed. As is customary in ethnographic research, codes were created to capture experiences and understandings that appeared significant to participants themselves, as well as influential contextual factors (Fetterman, 1998). Each participant’s data were coded separately, which allowed for an examination of each participant’s experience “within its [respective] real-life context” (Yin, 2003, p. 13). Internet searching, writing, peers, and emotions were among the many initial codes generated.

The individual cases were then brought together through comparisons of codes. Specifically, data associated with each code were analyzed to get more clarity on the properties (defining attributes) and dimensions (variation of properties) of each code and how they compared conceptually to other codes (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). As a result, some codes were kept intact and others were collapsed, broken out into more precise codes, or eliminated. For example, because there were many purposes for internet searching, this code was further delineated. All transcripts and notes were then recoded using the revised code list.

A constant comparison analytic approach was used, in which “incident[s] in the data [were] compared to other incidents for similarities and differences” (Corbin & Strauss, 2008, p. 79), both within and across participants. Incidents associated with particular codes were compiled to identify patterns among the codes and to develop “code families.” These included out-of-school technology use, social interactions, and perceptions of self. Next, data associated with various code families were compiled and instances of relationship between code families were arranged in matrices for comparison. Through this process, it became evident that participants’ perceptions differed, as related to contextual factors. For example, I found that for the three participants, data at the intersection of positive perceptions of self (e.g., confidence) and tech-mediated activities were rarely associated with in-school ICT use and that negative self-perceptions (e.g., lack of control) often coalesced around conditions in their lives over which they experienced limited control. Findings at this stage of data analysis were used to organize the participants’ experiences into three individual cases, as presented below.

Kristel

Kristel, an 18-year-old White girl, was a prolific fiction writer who composed and shared much of her writing with others through the internet. In our first meeting in the school library, Kristel showed me several poems she had submitted to Poetry.com , two of which were recent contest winners. “I’m one of the top 200 poets in the world right now,” she proudly proclaimed. In addition to her poetry, Kristel said she had written “a lot of fan fiction,” adopting the characters in some of her favorite works of fiction and writing them into new stories. “Some of my fan fiction has made people cry,” she added.

Kristel was also involved in a multiuser virtual environment (MUVE) called CanineWeb, an online space in which users built a complex, dynamic, and interactive story about the lives of wolves through textual postings. Kristel began posting on CanineWeb at the age of 13. She said that the virtual wolf she created, “Galaxy,” quickly became one of the website’s most popular characters, and she became the website moderator within a year of joining. Kristel interacted with both face-to-face friends and online associates in CanineWeb and other virtual environments, including a blogging website that she created as another forum for her writing. Describing this website, she said,

I think I have something like 25 characters currently, and all their stories are entwined. So it’s getting more and more complex. And I mean I’ve only got two chapters typed out for it, and I’m still updating it.

Kristel talked excitedly about feedback she received on the website, saying, “I’ve actually gotten people that have randomly come across the site and emailed me. And they were all like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is such an awesome site! I just added this to my favorites.’”

Kristel was also writing a science fiction novel online, L.A. Darkness. She expected the completed novel to have 24 chapters, 6 of which had been written by our last interview. Kristel chose to write L.A. Darkness online because, as she said, “I want to see what other people think so I can make changes to the actual hard copy of the story and then send it off to a publisher.”

In her online writing endeavors, Kristel appeared highly motivated as reflected in the goals she set for herself and her level of productivity. Character development, as she described, was connected to both her motivation and productivity:

The characters in the story; they drive you; they frustrate you; they compel you to finish the story. . . . You’ll go to sleep and all of a sudden you’ll hear this little voice in the back of your head going, “You need to write more about me.” Just like in the back of your head, and you just wake up. And then afterwards, if you go and you start typing, you’re fine. You, you can write pages upon pages, upon pages.

Not surprisingly, Kristel was enrolled in two advanced placement writing courses at school: Creative Writing and another fiction writing class through the Virtual High School (VHS). However, Kristel had profound difficulties in both classes. In the VHS writing class, which she said described as “boring as heck,” Kristel had failed to upload assignments. She claimed this was due to problems with the website. Describing this predicament, Kristel said,

My teacher hasn’t given me credit for anything. She said that I hadn’t done anything, and I have proof that I did everything for this week, so it’s like ridiculous. . . . I don’t like her and she doesn’t seem to like me. . . . I know I’m going to fail that class already.

Kristel also owed work in Creative Writing. She spoke about one assignment, which she said was not accepted by the teacher.

We had to write it the way she wanted it. We couldn’t write it the way that we wanted it. And so my finished product came out very, very bad: badly written, from her perspective. From mine it was a really well written piece of work. . . . she wouldn’t accept it because it was a songfic [based on song lyrics]. She said that it was a piece of crap. Everybody else was like crying when they read it.

Kristel felt that she had produced high-quality work, evidenced by positive responses from her peers, and she disagreed with her teachers’ judgment about what constituted valid genres of writing. She questioned the teacher’s pedagogical approach, saying,

“If it’s creative writing then why are you telling us what to write?” You shouldn’t be able to put a cap on your students’ aspirations. I mean she’s put me on a word limit. . . . So now I can’t go anywhere over two pages for each article. So that’s not very fair.

Clearly, Kristel felt that her talent as a writer was dishonored and stifled by her Creative Writing teacher. The difficulties she faced in her writing classes dampened her motivation to engage in school-based writing, which she compared to her out-of-school writing.

If I set a goal for myself, like I’ve said that by tomorrow I’m going to have Chapter Three of LA Darkness totally finished, that kind of keeps me on track. But with those [school papers] I don’t have any motivation at all to write them. I’ll just sit there and then I’ll come in like right before the class it’ll be like, “OK, I have to BS my way through this and just type something random.”

Kristel experienced “a gap between formal school literacy and [her] everyday literacy practices” (Luttrell & Parker, 2001, p. 245). She felt that some of her preferred genres and forms of writing did not “count” or were not valued in school. With obvious feelings of frustration and powerlessness, Kristel responded by devaluing and divesting effort from her school-based writing. This was in marked contrast to how she experienced her out-of-school writing. Kristel’s preference for working in online spaces was evident in her statement, “The real world sucks.”

Ann Marie

Ann Marie was a 17-year-old second-generation immigrant born to a Cambodian father and Vietnamese mother. Most of Ann Marie’s technology use was dedicated to communication with friends. She spent a great deal of time using instant messaging (IM), which she described it as a kind of “high” that was “fun” and “addicting.” She reported spending many hours engaged in this activity saying, “I’m online like four to five hours, five or six hours straight, without eating, bath, or without nothing.” At the beginning of the study, Ann Marie also used a cell phone for text messaging, but after receiving a monthly bill of US$984.00, she said her father “freaked out and he had to take the phone away.” Thereafter, Ann Marie’s text messaging was limited to internet-based IM clients.

Ann Marie also had three active email accounts and webpages on two social networking websites. She used these pages for communication and as a vehicle for building her technological skills. Using a scanner, digital camera, and image-editing software, Ann Marie created graphics for her webpages. She also took up the opportunity to learn and to write HTML code to manipulate the appearance of her website. “[When] I’m sick of the colors or how the format is and the picture is old,” she said, “I erase everything and redo everything all over again . . . to me it’s just a way of expanding your learning. You learn about the HTML and the codes.”

Ann Marie also described designing her webpages for others, saying, “I’m going to make a site and put my picture in and see how many girls I can get to respond back.” The primary audience for Ann Marie’s webpage consisted of other girls with whom she went to school. Maintaining and strengthening existing relationships was essential to the ways Ann Marie used these sites. She posted pictures of herself with her friends, and she wrote about them, publicly declaring their significance in her life. She added them to her “friends” lists, giving them special privileges on her websites, and she sought to prompt her friends to “respond back” to her as a way to maintain communication with them.

Like the adolescent girls in Schofield Clark’s (2005) study, Ann Marie primarily used electronic communication to “manage offline peer relationships through the online environment” (p. 216) and rarely communicated with strangers. When she did occasionally receive messages from people she did not know, she would “block them,” explaining, “I don’t like wasting my time talking to strangers.” Thus, she controlled with whom she shared her online spaces.

Ann Marie’s time outside of the home was restricted. After school, she cared for her younger brother and nephew while her parents worked. On weekends, she was only permitted to engage in activities with adult supervision. She described her parents as very “hard” on her. She understood this, in part, as culturally based, saying, “I think you know about Asian parents. They’re strict. I feel like they don’t understand certain things now because they’re really, really old-fashioned.” Ann Marie also said that her parents’ strictness was influenced by the fact that her two older sisters had dropped out of high school and had babies as teenagers. As result, according to Ann Marie, her parents were particularly protective of her.

Ann Marie was conflicted about her parents’ restrictions and sometimes challenged them. In response to her parents’ insistence that she cut off all communications with her boyfriend, Ann Marie said, “I feel like, ‘Okay, if I can’t see him after school, if I can’t talk on the phone, if I can’t talk to him on the internet, then I’m going to skip school and just go see him.’” She admitted to skipping 44 days of school, which likely bolstered her parents’ rationale for restricting her social activities. On the other hand, Ann Marie felt that she needed these limitations. Without her parents’ restrictions, she speculated, “I’d probably be bad. Yeah. I probably would be out every day. Don’t come home till late, late at night. . . . I’d be more out of control. Yeah, because I’m easily influenced.” Furthermore, she validated her parents’ concerns, describing the potential dangers of socializing outside of the home, saying,

When you’re out, you’re exposed to like dangerous things. Like, instead of being inside of my house in a computer chatting with my friends, I’m outside talking to my friends, talking about, ‘Oh, let’s go drink. Let’s go smoke,’ this and that. And you’ll feel like you’re pressured to do it, because you’re there with them.

Despite validating her parents’ concerns and restrictions, Ann Marie also resisted them by maintaining her relationship with her boyfriend and using IM of which her parents disapproved. In explaining how her own views about socializing differed from her parents’, Ann Marie asserted, “I’m really, really Americanized” and “I’m full way American.” However, she clearly felt both beholden to and protected by parental expectations that she prioritize family responsibilities and limit unsupervised, face-to-face social interactions, particularly as she saw herself as vulnerable to negative influences. Furthermore, it was important for her to prove to her parents that she would not repeat the “mistakes” of her sisters.

Ann Marie’s descriptions of her parents’ protectiveness reflect research on tensions between immigrant parents and their Americanized children due to parents’ fears and/or lack of knowledge of the new country and cultural expectations (Lopez, 2003; Portes & Rumbaut, 2001). Ann Marie clearly “face[d] the difficult task of integrating conflicting values” (Chan, 1994, p. 94) connected to familial expectations and peer relationship building. She managed this task by creating a technology-mediated social life in which she could maintain contact with friends while spending most of her free time at home. This solution, however, was not without conflict, and Ann Marie’s said that her parents worried about her online socializing. However, Ann Marie said she saw “nothing scary about it. I know myself.” She seemed confident that she could manage any potential dangers online —in stark contrast to her perceived vulnerability to negative influences in face-to-face peer interactions.

For Ann Marie, her internet use, which was apparently not strictly monitored, was perhaps the most viable means to sustain relationships with friends outside of school. She said,

When I’m online I can lock my door and I can talk to my boyfriend and my friend about anything I want without [my parents] being like, “What did you say?” You know, it’s more privacy. . . . I like my privacy and on a computer it’s like nobody’s listening.

Ann Marie was “able to employ new technologies to negotiate privacy issues in relation to [her] family” (Chan, 1994, p. 218). She described her bedroom as a space where she was relatively free from parental supervision; within this space, she had considerable control over her activities and her relationships with others via the internet.

King

King, born in Uganda, was 19 years old and a popular DJ, who DJ’d at area night clubs and parties and produced music for local MCs (rappers). Although DJ’ing was his specialty, King engaged in many forms of music production. In addition to turntables, mixers, synthesizers, amplifiers, speakers, microphones, and beat-making machines, King also used professional-level music production software to record, edit, master, and burn music tracks to CD. King committed most of his free time to using and developing his music-related skills, and the make-shift studio in his bedroom was a popular neighborhood hang-out. King worked virtually nonstop, late into the night, as friends and collaborators shifted in and out. He proclaimed, “All my time is in music.”

King believed that connections with others in the music industry were essential to his success. Without such connections, he said, “You’ll be good a million times, but you will never make it.” Thus, he actively pursued liaisons with people who he believed could help him advance professionally, including individuals connected to nightclubs, studios, production companies, and radio stations. King used these relationships to make music, to exchange information and expertise, and to gain access to the tools needed for music production. Situated within a network in which bartering and favors were primary means through which goods and services were exchanged, King was able to secure studio time and music-related equipment and to have it repaired and upgraded.

King’s activities also included a larger, more tangential group: listeners. As a DJ, he actively cultivated and reached out to this group, largely made up of local youth. In addition to working clubs and throwing parties, King organized an annual field day. Although he saw this event as a way to increase his marketability, it also reflected his strong sense of commitment to the youth in the city. He expressed concern that many of his peers were not living up their potential, saying,

They don’t care what they do. You see them on the street, walking around. They don’t try to find a job. They don’t try to do nothing for theirself. Just go home after school, skip classes, go smoke. You know? I just tell some of them, “You have a future. Why you gotta skip the class and just go smoke?”

He talked about his activities as opportunities to present himself as a positive role model for other young people, saying, “They see me like, ‘Oh, he doing something. He’s nice. He got this for hisself. Oh, I could do that.’”

King demonstrated a high level of self-assuredness in his music-related activities, which was evident in his reflections on DJ’ing. He asserted,

Like every time when I do parties? ‘Cause nobody don’t like me. You can just tell by the people . . . how many people show up for your party. Like they’re always asking me in the school, “When you gonna have another party?” It’s not my party that they want me to do it but people just come because of me.

Positive feedback from his listeners and peers boosted King’s sense of confidence that he was and would continue to be successful in his music-related endeavors. He said, “I always know I can go home and do this [music]. I turn this stuff gonna give me money, then I can make it. I can make my life living.” King clearly saw music as the most promising path to a “good future”—far more promising than academics.

In school, King was an English Language Learner and a special education student with below-average grades. In his favorite subject—math—which he described as “easy for me,” King had only progressed to Algebra I by senior year. King had twice failed the mathematics and English state high school exit exams. As the quotes reveal, King did not speak Standard English and he also had trouble with pronunciation. This, and his academic difficulties, was the result of a fractured relationship with schooling and language learning.

King’s first language was a localized Ugandan language. At age 8, King immigrated to Italy (his father had died, and his mother was in the United States), having had only 2 years of formal instruction in English at school and not having learned to read or write in his first language. In Italy, King lived with an aunt from Kenya who was fluent in a Kenyan language, Italian, and English. King struggled to communicate with her using the limited English he had acquired in Uganda. He recalled, “I would try to speak for her like the language [English]. I knew a little bit, but it still didn’t work for her.” In the 4 years that King spent in Italy, he was home schooled by his aunt, and his English proficiency did not improve much. Nor did he learn Italian.

At 12, King immigrated to the United States, staying for a year with his older brother in a household where everyone spoke Patois. There, King said, he acquired a Jamaican accent, which was evident in his speech. He then lived with his mother who was fluent in both their native Ugandan language and English. However, King had not developed fluency in English and had forgotten much of his native language, which he had barely used in 7 years. Describing these linguistic barriers he said, “I can have like a conversation with my mom, but no [sic] that long. Like sometimes she told me stuff like, if you go too fast, I get lost.” Due to his history of interruptions in schooling and shifting linguistic environments, King did not have well-developed reading and writing skills in any language.

King said he rarely did homework or sought help with school work, and he appeared to do little more than what was necessary to pass his classes. He occasionally spoke about going to college but, by the end of senior year, had not applied. Despite what might be seen as a devaluing of school, King demonstrated a clear understanding of the importance of school. He never skipped classes, was rarely absent, and encouraged his peers to stay in school, and despite his profound academic challenges, King (barely) passed all of his classes and graduated. However, he did not believe that his own academic capabilities would lead to the successful future he desired, and he assumed a relatively passive role in his learning in school. This was in stark contrast to King’s approach to his work in music, in which he constantly took on new challenges and pushed himself to develop skills and knowledge. Speaking about these endeavors he said, “I just want to work hard.” By all accounts, he did just that.

Strong Self-Efficacy Beliefs and the Role of ICT

Experiencing success is vital to developing strong self-efficacy beliefs as it provides tangible evidence that one is able to meet one’s goals. All three participants demonstrated success in their domains of ICT activity, which had two important dimensions—task completion and perceptions. Kristel created online forums for her writing. Ann Marie created webpages and connected with friends online. King DJ’d and produced music digitally. ICT provided participants with a variety of opportunities to engage in activities that they could successfully complete, reinforcing confidence in their capabilities within their domains of focus (Zulkosky, 2009).

Experiencing success is also contingent upon feeling that you are, indeed, successful. For participants, this was connected to verbal persuasion, and feedback from others was vital to evaluating their efforts. In compelling others respond to her online, Ann Marie was assured that she could maintain friendships, despite restrictions on her social interactions. Similarly, positive and constructive feedback, through email and web postings, bolstered Kristel’s confidence in her writing skills. Furthermore, in publishing online, she reached a larger audience than would have been possible in print.

Both verbal and “nonverbal persuasion” were important for King. He used the effects of his music on others to judge his success, and his confidence in his DJ’ing skills was bolstered by his ability to draw and please listeners. Significantly, advancements in home computing provided King with access to a domain of activity from which he likely would have been excluded when digital music production required a professional studio and costly equipment. For all three participants, the ICT-mediated products they created through task completion served as means for both external feedback and self-evaluation.

Data suggest that success and verbal (and nonverbal) persuasion strongly reinforced participants’ beliefs that their activities were significant and enhanced motivation. All demonstrated high levels of engagement as evidenced by their commitment to their activities. For example, Ann Marie learned to write HTML code in order to have more control over her webpages. Both King and Kristel set and pursued goals that reached beyond their current achievements; Kristel was actively working on a 26-chapter story, and King was continually developing his skills so that he could eventually become a professional music producer. All three demonstrated “flow” in their ICT use, described by Chen and McGrath (p. 404) as a “state of concentration . . . enhanced by the perception of clear goals and immediate feedback by the task.”

Particularly for Kristel and King, modeling also provided an important opportunity to develop self-efficacy beliefs in which ICT played a significant role. Through the internet, Kristel had access to many examples of writing. In her MUVEs and in other web spaces, she was continually reading others’ work, which guided and inspired her own. King surrounded himself with others engaged in similar pursuits and who possessed knowledge about and influence in the music-related activities he wished to pursue. In these primarily face-to-face interactions, King used technology-mediated products, such as music CDs and videotaped performances, to demonstrate his skills and worthiness of investment.

All three participants exhibited a sense of control over their activities and the conditions of their lives through their ICT use. This sense of control had two interconnected dimensions. King’s confidence that he could make a “good future” in music, Ann Marie’s certainty that she could maintain friendships, and Kristel’s belief in her talent as a writer, evidence their sense of control over their activities. The manipulative function of ITC enabled them to use it in an increasing variety of ways, in service of their interests and goals. Thus, they experienced simultaneous and mutually reinforcing growth in both their technological- and domain-specific competencies. Clearly, ICT provided valuable opportunities for these three adolescents to develop strong self-efficacy beliefs as well as the skills and means through which to actualize them.

Self-Efficacy and ICT Use in Broader Contexts

Evidence of participants’ strong self-efficacy beliefs seemed to dissipate in some aspects of their lives, pointing to several contextual factors. For example, whereas Kristel felt she was able to and did exercise control over her writing outside of school, in school, she often did not. Her case highlights the power of teachers to determine valued forms of knowledge and activities within the school context. Kristel’s attempts to exercise control over her writing in school resulted in unfavorable feedback and frustration, which are negative sources of self-efficacy. Kristel’s perceived lack of control was evident in her feeling that she had to capitulate to the teacher and just “BS” her way through her assignments. Like Kristel, King’s relative lack of success in and control over valued forms of knowledge and skill shaped his self-efficacy beliefs in school. Having experienced significant academic difficulties, he did not see academics as a promising route to future success. Although he did manage to graduate from high school, he experienced a relative lack of control over his academic experiences.

Opportunities for Ann Marie to socialize face to face were extremely limited due to her parents’ expectations. Her descriptions of her sisters’ dropping out of school and early pregnancies—powerful vicarious experiences—conveyed a family narrative that posed socializing outside of the home as dangerous. Ann Marie seemed to internalize this narrative as she conveyed self-doubt in her capacity to avoid such dangers, describing herself as particularly vulnerable to “bad” behaviors in face-to-face settings. Although her parents’ restrictions may have reduced Ann Marie’s exposure to danger, they also diminished her opportunities to develop strong self-efficacy beliefs in those contexts.

In the contexts in which participants demonstrated the strongest self-efficacy beliefs, adults had comparatively little power in shaping and legitimizing their experiences. In these spaces, participants were relatively free to pursue their interests and desires. The significance of these self-defined and controlled activities was evident in participants’ descriptions of their ICT-mediated activities. Participants were more likely to capitalize on their self-created opportunities provided by ICT to develop strong self-efficacy beliefs, particularly when ICT use was organized around activities in which they expressed interest.

Comparisons to circumstances in which participants demonstrated weak self-efficacy provide additional insight into the significance of ICT use. For Ann Marie, ICT provided vital opportunities to develop strong self-efficacy beliefs around her capabilities to nurture friendships in the absence of face-to-face opportunities for doing so. Kristel’s online writing experiences counteracted her negative experiences in school, and she drew on encouraging electronic communications to buttress her self-efficacy beliefs in the face of failing grades in her writing classes. For King, who did not see academics as a route to success, ICT provided a vital source of hope and a means through which to pursue a good future.

In looking across contexts, this study shows self-efficacy beliefs not simply as individual characteristics but as consequences of interactions between perceptions of self, opportunities and constraints, and relationships with others, in particular contexts. Findings suggest the possibility for these beliefs to carry over from one activity to another and that the manipulative function of ICT may aid in such transference. From this perspective, I return to the issue of transferability and consider how adults might help young people to bring the strong self-efficacy beliefs that they develop through ICT use, to other realms of their lives.