Parent–Adolescent Decision Making

Abstract

Contemporary research on parent–adolescent decision making has been concerned with decision outcomes and has viewed these outcomes as indicators of adolescent autonomy. We offer an alternative, dialogical perspective, which directs attention to how adolescents and parents co-construct a decision. The analysis is based on parent and daughter narrations of an important school choice—the decision to apply to a new college-preparatory middle school for girls. By highlighting the decision process in three families, we illustrate how co-construction of a decision can differ even among families who would be classified in the same way on the commonly used outcome assessment. We also question the concept of adolescent decision-making “autonomy” in that it has fostered a disregard for the rich dialogical context of all decision making.

Keywords

decision making family process dialogical narrative parents young adolescents autonomy

Most contemporary research on family decision making involving adolescents and their parents is not, in fact, concerned with decision “making.” It offers, instead, a concise rendering of family judgments about decision outcomes. Family members respond to questionnaire items about particular types of decisions concerning the adolescent, indicating who was the main decision maker. These items are seen as an index of adolescent autonomy. The questions posed in these studies, and their methods, are based on certain assumptions, usually implicit, for example, that the questionnaire items are a sufficient measure of parent–adolescent decision making and that families who respond in the same way to the questionnaire items can be treated as a homogeneous grouping.

Our purpose is to illustrate an alternative, dialogical perspective in the study of parent–adolescent decision making. This perspective promotes exploration of dialogical meaning creation engendered by engagement in a family decision and how this meaning creation can differ among families who would be classified as representing the same decision type in contemporary research. The question is not just whether adolescent or parent makes a given decision but rather the process of decision making and the meanings created during that process by family members. We illustrate the application of this perspective in an analysis of interviews conducted with parents and with their young adolescent daughters about a school choice decision. The decision was significant for these families in that it involved a new, college preparatory school for girls in the community.

Overview of Current Research: Method, Goals, and Assumptions

Contemporary investigators define parent–adolescent decision making as an indicator of behavioral autonomy. Behavioral autonomy is “youth’s freedom to regulate their own behavior as part of the process of developing independence and self-guided action” (Wray-Lake, Crouter, & McHale, 2010, p. 636). Family decision making, as one type of behavioral autonomy, is referred to in various ways. For example, Smetana, Campione-Barr, and Daddis (2004) label it as an indicator of the degree of adolescent self-governance within the family. Others use the term parental autonomy granting (Supple, Ghazarian, Peterson, & Bush, 2009).

The typical assessment of family decision making is modeled on a questionnaire procedure developed by Dornbusch (Dornbusch, Ritter, Mont-Reynaud, & Chen, 1990). Parents or adolescents are presented with a list of decision types and are asked to indicate who makes the decision. During the past decade, this type of assessment has been used in a number of studies (Hasebe, Nucci, & Nucci, 2004; Huiberts, Oosterwegel, VanderValk, Vollebergh, & Meeus, 2006; Qin, Pomerantz, & Wang, 2009; Romich, Lundberg, & Tsang, 2009; Smetana et al., 2004; Wray-Lake et al., 2010). Two expansions of Dornbusch et al.’s (1990) original measure are the differentiation of decision domains and the inclusion of more response options. Both are represented in Smetana et al. (2004) as well as in some of the other studies. The basis for the domain distinction is that autonomy in decision making has a different time course over the adolescent years depending on the decision domain, occurring first for decisions in the personal domain (e.g., clothes, use of free time) and later for decisions in conventional (e.g., doing chores) and prudential (e.g., alcohol and drug use) domains. Response options were expanded in the Smetana et al. (2004) study to distinguish between sole decision making and decision making with discussion, as follows: (a) leave it entirely up to the adolescent, (b) leave the decision up to the adolescent after discussing it, (c) make the decision together, (d) parents ask adolescent’s opinion but retain the final say, (e) parents decide without discussing it.

The questions of interest in the studies cited above are the changes in parent–adolescent decision making over time, variations in these trajectories with decision domain and with a variety of other sociodemographic and sociosocietal factors, and the relation of decision outcomes to indicators of healthy adolescent functioning. For example, Wray-Lake et al. (2010) studied longitudinal patterns across the adolescent years of parental reports of decision making, showing variations by decision domains and other factors such as adolescent gender and parent education level. Smetana et al. (2004) reported longitudinal trends for African American families showing variations by decision domain and relationships with adolescent measures of academic achievement, self-worth, problem behaviors, and depressed mood. Hasebe et al. (2004), also interested in family decision making in relation to adolescent adjustment, found that, for both U.S. and Japanese adolescents, greater perceived parental control in the domain of personal issues was associated with higher scores on a measure of internalizing symptoms. Similarly, Qin et al. (2009) reported a positive association, consistent for both U.S. and Chinese adolescents, between autonomy in the domain of personal decisions and emotional functioning (a combined measure of several scales including the reporting of positive emotions, life satisfaction, and self-esteem).

Four underlying assumptions of any research that uses some form of this decision-making questionnaire are, first, that it is the variation between decision-making categories rather than within categories that is important. Potential variation among families who respond in the same way to the questionnaire items (e.g., that adolescents alone make certain decisions) is not explored. A second assumption of the assessment method is homogeneity within the categories of decisions being presented for rating. If the item asks about adolescent chores, it is assumed that all interactions about chores result in the same outcome. Third, despite the use of relational terminology in some of these studies (family negotiations, interacting influences), interpretations often suggest “a normative assumption that the right and power to make decisions is initially held by parents and then transferred to children via a parent-controlled process” (Romich et al., 2009, p. 587). Romich et al. contest this view and elaborate ways that adolescents, both indirectly and actively, are participants in family decisions, and they present data to support the importance of adolescent influences. Finally, there is the assumption that it is decision outcomes that matter; hence, it is not necessary to probe potential differences in how a given decision came about or what it might mean for family members.

A Dialogical Alternative

Dialogism, as defined by Linell (2009), is a set of metatheoretical assumptions underlying certain theories or perspectives across a range of disciplines and content areas. It is a broad palette to which many philosophies and theories have contributed components. The main assumptions of dialogism (Linell offers several others beyond these) are that “sense making” is (a) dynamic—to be seen as actions rather than states; (b) inherently social—interactive and intersubjective; (c) contextual—always interdependent with dynamically changing contexts; and (d) mediated—often by language but also through perception, habits, artifacts, and other means. Minds are social and dialogical in nature: “knowledge, norms, concepts, and language originate in the social world . . . [and] ‘internal’ voices are invoked and interpenetrate, when the individual engages in reflective thinking or self-talk” (Linell, 2009, p. 79).

Ashbourne (2009) has advocated the application of a dialogic model of communication—relational dialectics theory (Baxter, 2011)—to the study of parent–adolescent relationships. In contrast to the outcome orientation of most current research, a dialogic model focuses attention on relationship processes, the mutuality and individuality of meaning construction in relationships, the dialectical tensions in meanings, and the interchange between meanings and the larger context. We are in agreement with Ashbourne’s call for a dialogical perspective in the study of adolescent–parent relationships, but we base our research in dialogical self theory rather than in relational dialectics.

As formulated by Hermans and colleagues (Hermans, 2001, 2003; Hermans & Hermans-Jansen, 2003; Hermans & Kempen, 1993; Salgado & Hermans, 2005), dialogical self theory draws inspiration from the writings of both William James and Mikhail Bakhtin. Dialogues occur not only interpersonally, in interaction with actual others, but intrapersonally as well. Instead of a centralized, inner I engaging with an outer world, the self is a system of I–Other relations. These I–Other relations, or positions, are affectively linked meanings, always associated with feelings. The metaphor is of a dynamic polyphonic novel, with “conversations” occurring in an intrapsychic space or landscape. Thus, just as people position themselves in different ways in interaction with others, they position themselves in internal dialogues, and this positioning is always in relation to Other (particular people but also groups, ideologies, etc.).

The theory is contextual on several levels. Most notable in this regard is its conceptualization of dialogue with Other as not only an interpersonal but also an intrapersonal phenomenon. Yet the interpersonal is not minimized; within this theory, interpersonal and intrapersonal processes are of equal importance. As well, it incorporates consideration of the proximal and distal social context. Both intrapersonally and interpersonally, dialogues are situated, and constrained, in terms of a particular, actual, or imagined audience and within an immediate context. In a more global sense, meanings are created in a cultural and historical context of common understandings that make dialogue possible, and also constrain it.

Dialogical theory (in this instance, relational dialectics) has been used as a framework for one prior study of adolescent-parent decision making. Ashbourne and Daly (2010) reported analyses of interviews with parents and their older adolescent children about negotiation of time choices. These negotiations varied not only with family member but also with external influences such as the different schedules of family members, their orientation to the future and to shifting hierarchies within the family, and attitudes toward certain types of shared activities. There were areas of agreement between parents and adolescents but also tensions in the domains of autonomy-connection and stability-change as family members negotiated their time choices.

Although not explicitly based in dialogical theory, research by Bassett, Chapman, and Beagan (2008) on the co-construction of adolescent food choice is compatible with a dialogical perspective. Data gathering involved interviews with parents and adolescents, observations of a family meal, and accompanying families on a trip to the grocery store. Their analysis portrays a complex and nuanced interplay between parents and their adolescent children in the negotiation of food choice where each is responsive to the other. Parents (typically mothers) use strategies to influence and control adolescent food choices, including “setting the parameters” (p. 328) by limiting the choices available in the home and by refusing to let teens go with them to the grocery store. Yet mothers also are responsive to adolescents’ food preferences and are open to negotiation, for example, when adolescents do not like the family meal and want to fix something else. Teens complain, refuse, and ignore their parents’ advice but at the same time often begin to monitor their own choices in ways consistent with parental coaching.

What emerges from these two studies is a conception of decision making as an ongoing, give-and-take process between parents and adolescents. The strategies of parents and adolescents cannot be understood except in relation to the actions of the other.

Summary and Purpose

Most current research on parent–adolescent decision making addresses these decisions in a limited way. It focuses on outcomes and restricts the data obtained to a single rating for each decision being considered. Family members are asked to rate a decision type rather than a particular decision, making this a difficult task and complicating interpretation of the ratings. And by their use of terms such as autonomy granting, authors often imply that decisions are governed by parents.

The present study is based on interviews with parents and their young adolescent daughters about a middle school choice. Families regarded their decision to apply to the school as important, some said potentially life changing, in that this was a new public school for girls offering a college preparatory curriculum to enhance educational opportunities, primarily for girls in low-income families. During the interview, parents and adolescents were encouraged and prompted to talk in detail about how they arrived at their decision.

Our purpose was to describe decision making as expressed in these family narratives and to analyze the meanings engendered by the school choice for parent and adolescent, in relation to one another. Guided by dialogical self theory, our specific aim was to identify I–Other positions for each family member relative to their decision goals and to one another. With reference to the assessment of decision making used in many contemporary research studies, all these families clustered in one decision category, “Leave the decision up to the child after discussing it” (Smetana et al., 2004, p. 1422). Thus, we had the opportunity to elaborate on the standard assessment method by addressing the range of family interactions that might lie behind a given questionnaire response.

Method

Setting for the School Choice Decision

In the first few months of 2008, the Lubbock, Texas, community was informed of a new public school to be opened in the fall. The Margaret Talkington School for Young Women Leaders (YWL) arose from a partnership between the Lubbock Independent School District and the Foundation for the Education of Young Women, a foundation that has established several similar schools around the state. YWL is a public school that will eventually enroll girls in Grades 6 to 12, adding one grade per year. Its mission is college preparation for girls, primarily girls from low-income families.

Admission to YWL is based on grades, test scores, attendance and discipline records, teacher recommendations, and a writing sample from the students. Approximately 70% of students must come from economically disadvantaged families who, based on income, qualify for free or reduced lunch programs for their children. Recruitment for the new school during spring 2008 consisted of presentations by the school principal to fifth-grade girls at the elementary schools, community presentations, media coverage, and letters sent inviting applications from girls who would qualify for admission based on grades and test scores. The school received approximately 150 applications from fifth-grade girls, and of these, 75 were admitted for fall 2008.

Families

Families were recruited for this study by visiting YWL sixth-grade classes early in the fall 2008 semester, describing the study, and handing out information for the girls to take home. The information sheet said that we wanted to hear about their experiences in choosing YWL, that the study involved interviews with parents/guardians and with students, and that families would be paid $30 for their time. Families wishing to participate returned contact information to the school, at which time we called them to arrange the interviews. In all, 25 families returned information; we interviewed 15 families who sent back information within our time frame for data collection and who responded to our telephone messages. These 15 families were diverse in terms of race/ethnicity (8 Caucasian, 4 Hispanic, 2 African American, 1 both Hispanic and African American), family constellation (3 mother only, 7 biological parents, 1 adoptive, 2 stepfamily, 1 joint custody, 1 mother and grandparents), and parents’ education level (parents in 3 families were enrolled in college, at least one parent in 5 families had graduated with a college degree; others had not attended college).

Interview Procedures

Interviews took place either in family homes (11) or in university offices (4), depending on the family’s preference. Each family was interviewed by two women graduate students, one interviewing the daughter and one the parent(s) in different rooms. In all, four graduate students were involved in the interviewing. Parents interviewed were mother only (10), grandmother (1), mother and father together (3), and mother and grandmother together (1). Prior to the tape-recorded interviews, parents and daughters reviewed and signed consent (or assent) forms. Following the interview, each interviewer wrote notes on the interview setting and their impressions and reactions to the interview.

Parents and daughters were asked similar questions about the school choice process. First, they were asked to tell their whole story—the decision process from when they first heard about the school. The telling of their story was followed by a series of questions, for example, about the pros and cons that they considered, who was involved in the decision, how many conversations they had about the decision, the main reasons they decided to apply, the application process, how they heard about acceptance to YWL, and the reasons they thought other families (or girls) did not apply to the school.

Analysis Procedure

Our procedure was a positioning analysis based in dialogical theory. Other forms of positioning theory and analysis include those of Harré and colleagues (Harré, Moghaddam, Cairnie, Rothbart, & Sabat, 2009) and Bamberg (2004; Korobov & Bamberg, 2004). Based in social constructionism (Harré) and narrative “small story” (Bamberg) perspectives, both have focused on how meanings are created via positioning in everyday interactions and how these meanings relate to the larger social context.

From the perspective of dialogical theory, as in the above approaches, positioning is viewed as a dynamic co-construction process (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010). However, positioning of self and others occurs not only in actual interaction with others but also intrapersonally. Thus, it is not just the analysis of interactions in people’s everyday contexts that is of interest but also the dialogical positioning as people reflect on and speak about their lives in general (Aveling & Gillespie, 2008; Hermans, 2003; Hermans & Hermans-Jansen, 2003) or, as in this study, about a particular decision.

Dialogically based positioning analysis is inherently contextual in that people are continually dialoging with actual and imagined others, with policies and practices, with values and societal-level narratives. Although any given analysis must be more narrowly focused, it is important to bear in mind this larger picture, and it also is important that the full interviews serve as context for more specific analyses and interpretations. To this end, we spent several months reading the interviews, writing comments, and discussing the interviews in group sessions where the interviewers talked of the interview setting and their experiences.

Based on these discussions and additional readings of the interviews, further analysis was conducted both independently and collaboratively by the first three authors. We derived five questions and then categorized relevant content from the interviews according to these question headings. The questions were the following: (a) who initiated the discussion about the school, (b) how did families get information about the school, (c) how did the decision process proceed, (d) what were parent and adolescent goals and the bases for these goals, and (e) what strategies did family members use to achieve their goals. Working from this extracted interview content, we then compared parent and daughter narratives on the decision process, noting agreements and disagreements about how the decision was made.

The focus of the positioning analysis presented here is the following:

Parent and adolescent positioning relative to the decision—their goals.

Self and other positioning as parent/daughter. This included self positioning as parent or daughter—always in relation to the other—and positioning of the other (how parent positions daughter, how daughter positions parent).

For the positioning analysis, extracts from the interviews were used to document each of the positionings, and these were reviewed by two other authors who were very familiar with the interview content.

Positioning Analysis: Three Families

The positioning analysis revealed certain commonalities among all 15 families in the study. The most important of these for our purposes was that in all instances (a) there was some discussion within the family about the decision and (b) once the daughter had been accepted to YWL, it was her choice to attend the school or not. Decision making involved the immediate family, typically just parent(s) and daughter; siblings and extended family did not play an important role in the decision. Most families had information about the school from multiple sources (letter from the school district, presentations by the YWL principal in elementary schools and community settings, newspaper articles, sometimes consultations with teachers and school guidance counselors). Daughter and parent narratives were generally in agreement on the above and on the sequence of events leading to the decision.

In what follows, we describe the decision-making analysis for three families (who are identified by study names). These families were chosen because they illustrate variations in family decision-making dynamics among the larger group of families.

Talking Her Into It: Williams Family

Parents

Family members interviewed were Shirley and David (parents, interviewed jointly) and their daughter, Kaylee. Shirley was the one who first heard about YWL, and she “kinda brought it up to her” [Kaylee], then went to an informational meeting to find out more about it. David sounded determined in saying, “Regardless of whether we got in or not, we were going to apply.” Shirley summarized their reasons: “We felt like she would almost get a private school education without us having to pay for it. . . . We just looked at it as a great opportunity.” The parents talked of Kaylee’s ambivalence and attributed it to her reluctance to leave her friends, none of whom were applying to YWL. In the face of this ambivalence, the parental strategy was to convince Kaylee to apply, saying that she could postpone her decision about attending the school until after they found out if she had been accepted. “So you know, we just kinda talked her into applying for it, saying, ‘Let’s just see if you get in . . . ’” Shirley took charge of getting the required recommendations from Kaylee’s teachers and school counselor, and then, after Kaylee had completed her portion, of turning in the application packet. According to Shirley, the day Kaylee got accepted, “At first she was just like, ‘I don’t know if I wanna go,’ and then she took the letter into her room, and then a little bit later, she wanted to frame the letter.”

Daughter

Kaylee’s account was consistent with that of her parents regarding the decision process, but she placed more emphasis on her feelings about leaving her friends and on her friends’ reactions. “My mom had already told me about the school and how she wanted me to go, and I wasn’t really interested in it, but my friends really were not interested whatsoever. They thought I was a freak for going.” She talked of how her friends threw away the application but she kept it “ . . . and my mom told me to just see if I would get in.” She wrote the required essay “like the day before it was due.” She described having a lot of conversations about it with her parents and how they “definitely, 100%, without a doubt wanted me to go.” When she received the acceptance letter for YWL, she had just come home from a sleepover with her friends,

So I was in a really bad mood, and I didn’t want to go very much at all. . . . I actually cried ’cause I was mad because I wanted to go to [neighborhood school] so badly . . . but then my mom, like, talked me into it.

In addition, Kaylee said that the opportunity for students to have input on school colors and a mascot for the new school, which was included with the acceptance letter, “kind of helped me into it ’cause it seemed really interesting.” At the time of the interview, some months later, she pointed out the framed acceptance letter on her bedroom wall.

Positioning analysis

Parent goals relative to this decision were to convince Kaylee to submit the application to YWL and then to convince her to attend the school once she was accepted. They described themselves as wanting what was best for Kaylee, and they saw YWL as offering exceptional academic opportunities. In the face of Kaylee’s ambivalence, they saw it as their responsibility as parents to influence her decision, but at the same time saw it as “her choice.” They expressed understanding and sympathy for Kaylee’s struggle regarding the decision and acknowledged how difficult it had been for her: “She was really courageous, I think, when she realized the opportunity and decided to do it.” Kaylee positioned herself as ambivalent and as being “talked into it” by her parents. She did not refuse to write her essay for the application but did it reluctantly and at the last minute. She portrayed herself as more of a reactor than an actor up to the point that she received the acceptance letter. At that point, when faced with the final decision, she made it “her own” by using the symbolic resource (Zittoun, 2006) of YWL acceptance materials (invitation to participate in the choice of school colors and mascot), explaining that the school now sounded “really interesting.” Although Kaylee talked of being “mad” from time to time throughout the interview, she did not question the legitimacy of her parents’ actions with regard to the school decision.

An Education in Decision Making: Ortiz Family

Mother

The family conversation about YWL was initiated by Ivonne Ortiz’s daughter, Tiara, who, according to Ivonne, heard a presentation about YWL and came home “all excited” saying “I wanna go. I wanna go.” Ivonne’s concern was whether her daughter was “really serious” about applying to YWL, and she reported telling Tiara, “Until you do that paper [for the application] I’m not gonna realize that you’re taking it serious, that you really wanna do this.” Ivonne’s main goal was to teach Tiara that “you can’t just start something and quit it,” and this was further illustrated by her account of their interaction when Tiara received her acceptance letter. Because some of her friends had not been accepted to the school, Tiara suddenly “wanted out.” Ivonne relayed the subsequent conversation: “Well, you need to tell me because there’s other little girls that wanna go, and I’ll let them know that they can take you off so they can notify someone else.” to which Tiara replied, “Okay, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me make sure.” Ivonne went on to say, “So, I guess, ultimately, we let her make the decision that ‘Yes, she wanted to go,’ but once it was decided, she couldn’t change her mind.” Ivonne’s more general commentary on decision making, at another point in the interview, was, “I have this way that I work with them where I make them think like it’s their decision, but it’s really not . . . you know what I mean?”

Daughter

Tiara reported her mother saying, “It’s your choice to go to [local school] or to the all-girl’s school,” and she talked of the decision as her own. She was excited about the prospect of attending YWL—“I heard it gets us into college and just a bunch of opportunities for charity and things like that.” But her enthusiasm waxed and waned during the process: “It took me like about, like one day I’d wanna go, the next day I wouldn’t, and like it took me about one or two months to decide.” She talked of conversations about the choice, mainly with her mother, where they discussed the pros and cons. She viewed her mother as “liking it” but did not perceive her parents as trying to influence her decision. She worked hard on her application essay, revising it many times, getting feedback each time from her mother, and she was responsible for getting the recommendations from her teachers. She expressed excitement at receiving the acceptance letter, but then had renewed doubts,

Like I think, “Is this the right decision for me?” Or “Should I decide to go to [neighborhood school]?” . . . you had a choice if you would wanna accept their acception [sic] or not, but if I didn’t, then that means someone else would take my spot and I’d never have an opportunity like this anymore.

Positioning analysis

Although she saw YWL as a good opportunity for her daughter, Ivonne’s primary goal was to use the opportunity of the YWL decision to teach her daughter the importance of following through and “not quitting” once you’ve made a decision. Ivonne positioned herself as a parent-educator and emphasized the use of parental strategies to teach her children life skills. She said that she works in different ways with each of her children because “not all kids are the same.” Although placing high value on a college education for her children, Ivonne prioritized the development of Tiara’s decision-making skills over the choice of a particular middle school. Tiara clearly saw the YWL decision as her own and positioned herself as benefitting from, but not being governed by, parental consultation. Notably, in describing her indecision at the time of receiving the acceptance letter, she relayed what her mother had told her (somebody else will take your spot) but in her own words without attribution to her mother. Thus, it seems that her mother’s words had become her own. There also was an indication of Tiara’s awareness of her mother’s strategies. In the context of talking about some girls who in her view were “forced” to go to YWL, Tiara said,

Like, if your parents make you go there, that makes you more not wanna go there, but if you have a choice, it makes you kind of want to get the choice that not much people would choose and be unique, and at this school, I had a choice, and that kinda made me wanna go there.

Can I Mom? Can I Mom? Munoz Family

Mother

Maria Munoz said her daughter, Angelica, heard about YWL at her school, “I guess a teacher or the principal told her,” and asked if she could get an application, saying “Can I mom? Can I mom?” Maria and Angelica’s dad (who lives separately) visited the school site, at that time under construction, and felt that YWL would be a good option for their daughter. But Maria narrated the decision as being initiated by, and driven by, her daughter. Maria valued educational opportunity, but “My girl’s very smart, so whatever school she goes to, she’s very smart.” Maria’s goals were twofold, the first of which was insuring her daughter’s happiness. “Anything that’s important to her, of course it matters to us, and we care and we want her to be happy.” The second goal was protecting her daughter. She often referred to Angelica as “my baby,” saying, for example, “My baby’s an innocent little girl, and I want to keep her that way;” “she’s our only daughter left . . . she’s the only baby;” and “We are very protective of Angelica.” She relayed an incident when Angelica was having problems with another girl at school so her father went to talk with the principal about it, even though Angelica objected: “She tells me, ‘No mom, I have to handle it,’ ’cause then they’re going to call me like I’m a tattletaler or something like that.” Maria talked of her parenting dilemma:

So it’s hard for us, and we want, we want to respect her. . . . We can’t just, “This is the way it’s gonna be!” No, we can’t do that, so we have to give her her space, her time.

Daughter

Angelica told of her reactions when she first heard about YWL in a school presentation, thinking it was “cool” even though a lot of girls “didn’t think it was that great.” “Like, right when I heard about it, I immediately wanted to go.” She was attracted to YWL because it was college preparatory and “not a lot of my family” has gone to college. She also liked the idea of uniforms because she felt she did not have “very stylish clothes,” and she wanted to get away from kids in her current school who had been “mean” to her. She said her family liked it because it was college preparatory and “they knew that I’d be away from boys.” She recalled talking with her mom, sister, and dad about whether she was really sure she wanted to do this. Although, as with the other families, parental permission was required, Angelica narrated this decision as mainly her own and as a goal to which she was committed from the time that she first heard about YWL.

Positioning analysis

Maria positioned herself as a protective parent and talked of Angelica as “her baby.” She recognized that her baby was growing up by relaying a story about a problem at school that illustrated her daughter’s request to “handle it herself,” and she used the story as an opportunity to express her parental struggles with giving Angelica some “space.” However, Angelica’s school choice decision was not viewed by Maria as exemplifying this struggle. Rather, she saw YWL as offering not only educational opportunities but also increased protection for her daughter compared with other public school options. Angelica positioned herself as the initiator of the school choice and in the role of “convincing” her parents that this would be a good school for her. Hers was a story of determination to take this opportunity where she could have a “fresh start.”

Discussion

The analysis of the family narratives illustrates a dialogically based approach to the study of parent–adolescent decision making. These narratives enable us to exemplify and make more concrete the implications of a dialogical perspective.

Listening to Families

Family members clearly are able to respond to questions about who made a given decision, as they are asked to do on decision-making questionnaires and as they did in our interviews. The families in our study would be similarly categorized on the questionnaire used by Smetana et al. (2004) and others: School choice was ultimately the adolescent’s decision and was always preceded by varying amounts of discussion with parents. Yet as we have seen, the actual decision process among the three families was quite different in ways, we would argue, that matter for the validity of this assessment procedure. What does it tell us about family decision making to combine Kaylee’s reluctance and last-minute agreement with Tiara’s vacillation and Angelica’s enthusiastic taking charge and working to convince her parents to allow her to attend YWL?

From the theoretical perspective of this study, the ongoing I–Other positionings that characterize both intrapersonal and interpersonal sense-making are coordinated through narrative (Hermans, 2001, 2003; Hermans & Hermans-Jansen, 2003). Thus, dialogically based research typically involves narrative in some form. In the realm of family decision making, in addition to the family narratives presented here, the previously described study by Ashbourne and Daly (2010) on family decisions about time choices is illustrative. The authors show how joint parent and adolescent discussions of time choice exemplify the “push and pull, or dialectical tensions, demonstrated in family negotiations of time and the co-construction of meaning about time in parent-adolescent relationships” (p. 1435). This research makes it hard to imagine what simplifying devices family members would use to summarize family decisions in a questionnaire rating about adolescents’ time use, and also hard to imagine how such ratings would be interpreted.

Outcomes Versus Processes

The above distinction between questionnaires and narrative as a means of studying adolescent–parent decision making is not just a preference regarding method but signifies fundamental differences in the approaches—a variable-focused outcome orientation versus a person-in-context process orientation. As illustrated by the studies reviewed earlier, questions addressed within the former approach concern statistical relationships between decision outcomes and other factors. Questions addressed by the latter approach concern transactional processes and emergent meanings, as in the present study (see also Baron, Bell, Corson, Kostina-Ritchey, & Frederick, 2012). In her dialogical model of parent–adolescent relationships, Ashbourne (2009), too, emphasizes processes and meanings that emerge in interaction for both adolescents and parents. These are questions about the “how” rather than about the “what” of decision making.

Additional differences between these orientations include (a) their goal of breadth versus focus, (b) their conceptualization of the person–context relationship, and (c) their treatment of individual variability. The distinction between breadth and focus is evident in the strategies for sample selection and the range of family decisions considered. Within an outcome approach, the goal is to identify outcome differences based on adolescent age or gender, family socioeconomic status, type of family decision, societal context, and so forth. Large and diverse samples, and inclusion of many variables, are needed to accomplish this goal. From a person-in-context process orientation, the aim is more likely to be an in-depth study of transactions focusing on one or a small number of families engaged in narrating a particular decision or type of decision.

Person and context within an outcome orientation are separate entities that affect one another. This is reflected in the terminology of independent/dependent variables and the analyses associated with this terminology. In the person-in-context dialogical orientation, person and context are mutually constitutive, as in Overton’s (2006) explication of relational metatheory. For example, as discussed in more detail in the next section, questions are posed not about parent or adolescent influences but rather about parent and adolescent transactions and interdependence.

Individual variability within an outcome orientation is treated as “error.” The comparisons of interest from this approach are between decision outcome categories not among families within categories. In contrast, for the person-in-context orientation, analysis begins at the individual family level because this is where transactional processes can be identified. Families might later be grouped for some purposes, but such groupings would be based on within-family positioning dynamics not on predesignated outcome categories. From this orientation, variation also is expected in how families narrate a decision depending on context. Family members in this study might well have told their stories somewhat differently to other family members, or to friends, than they did to interviewers. Langellier and Peterson (2004), in their studies of family storytelling, illustrate the ways in which people “perform” family in highly contextualized ways. The theoretical principles of dialogism incorporate this variability within the principles of I–Other relations and meaning creation.

Direction of Effects

Parent–adolescent decision making is sometimes referred to as parental autonomy granting (e.g., Supple et al., 2009), implying that the direction of effects are from parent to adolescent. In reaction to parenting interpretations, there has been a tendency to demonstrate an alternative direction of influence, from adolescent to parent (Romich et al., 2009). What is not accomplished by the preferencing of either parent or adolescent effects is a relational, co-construction analysis as illustrated by the narratives of the three families. The Williams parents took the lead and spent a lot of time with Kaylee, “talking her into it,” not just because they were enthusiastic about YWL but because Kaylee was reluctant and needed convincing. By her own admission, Kaylee would not have made the ultimate decision to attend YWL had her parents been less persistent in their advocacy. Similarly, Ivonne Ortiz would have had no need to use her teaching strategies with Tiara if her daughter had not repeatedly changed her mind about the school choice. And Tiara might not have positioned herself quite so firmly as the primary decision maker if Ivonne had not employed her strategy of making them “think it’s their decision, but it’s really not.” For the Munoz family, we were unable to identify any parental strategies relative to the school choice decision perhaps because, based on both parent and daughter narratives, there was no need. Angelica heard a presentation on YWL, was highly motivated to get a fresh start in a new school setting, obtained parent approval, and took the initiative in completing and submitting the application. Her mother viewed her as competent to make this decision, and thus the parents saw no reason to do anything other than to be supportive. However, their positioning regarding this particular decision should not be taken as reflecting a laissez-faire parenting style; in other contexts, her mother talked of teaching Angelica lessons in responsibility and of using discipline techniques “if she misbehaves.”

From a dialogical perspective, decision making cannot be explained by parenting styles or by child effects. Like any interaction, decision making occurs as ongoing transactions between family members situated in particular contexts. Dialogism does not rule out power differentials—parents typically have greater power in the sense of structuring the home situation, withholding resources, and so on. But recognition of power differentials is quite different from the theoretical assumption of unidirectional effects that often is implicit, if not explicit, in research on parent–adolescent interaction and relationships.

Decision-Making “Autonomy”

We have commented on the decision-making assessment method widely used in contemporary research, but we wish to go further and to raise a more fundamental question, namely, whether the concept of autonomous decision making is a useful and valid way of characterizing the decision making of parents and adolescents, or of anyone. The dimension of autonomous decision making is defined as follows: “Youth autonomy is minimal when parents make unilateral decisions for youth, moderate when parents and youth make joint decisions, and complete when youth make decisions unilaterally” (Wray-Lake et al., 2010, p. 637). The difficulty is that—unless one takes the view that people function independently of their contexts—there is no such thing as an autonomous decision. This might be chalked up to semantics in that the term adolescent autonomy as used in these studies only refers to degree of perceived parental input in decision making, not to completely independent actions. But we see this as more than a trivial issue in that the definition guides research, from the questions being asked to the interpretations and implications.

People live in material contexts and richly figured and fluid discursive worlds (e.g., Hermans, 2001; Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998), and decision making is both constrained and afforded by these contexts. An adolescent’s decision to get a tattoo, for example, would be categorized via decision-making questionnaires as an autonomous decision if parents have no input. But in fact the decision emerged from a multitude of actual and imagined dialogues with relatives, peers, other adults, the media, societal narratives about tattoos, and parents or guardians. Just because parents or parental figures do not have explicit, verbal input in a given decision does not mean that they are not often very much present in adolescents’ imagined dialoguing about the decision, and in turn, that adolescents are not very much present, and influential, in parents’ “unilateral” decisions. For these reasons, we advocate a shift away from questions about autonomous decision making and toward questions about the kinds of dialoguing or I–Other positioning that surrounds a given family decision as in the present study.

Embracing Complexity

Adolescent–parent decision making, like all interpersonal and intrapersonal meaning creation, is nuanced and complex. We have presented just a small portion of that complexity via a targeted positioning analysis of parent and adolescent narratives about a school choice decision. There are many ways to go about capturing this complexity, from a fine-grained analysis of family talk over the course of a week (Gordon, 2004), to multiple sources of data including the observation of family meal preparation (Bassett et al., 2008), to interviews with family members, as we have done here. But the point that we and others (e.g., Ashbourne, 2009) are attempting to convey is that an oversimplifying and ignoring of the complexity is not, ultimately, the pathway that will lead to advancing our understanding of parent–adolescent decision making or of other family processes.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We extend our thanks for her assistance to Dr. Kim Perry, Principal of the Margaret Talkington School for Young Women Leaders, and to the families who participated in the interviews.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for this project was provided by the Virginia and Choc Hutcheson Endowed Professorship held by the first author.

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