Brazilian adolescents’ conceptions of autonomy and parental authority
Section snippets
Settings and participants
The study was conducted in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Porto Alegre is the largest city in southern Brazil and is the capital of the state of Rio Grande do Sul. It has a population of 1,500,000. The southeastern region of Brazil, and the city of Porto Alegre in particular, is highly industrialized. As a corollary of this industrialization, per capita income is higher in the southeastern region than in the northern parts of Brazil (Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IGBE, 2005). Porto
Results
The design of the study, in which the same four questions were presented across four different stories, suggested that they might elicit replications of the same judgments from participants. If there are no systematic variations in responses across the stories, then responses to each question could be combined for subsequent analyses. For example, if participants tended to respond in the same way to the “Who should decide?” question, subsequent analyses could be conducted on all results to that
Discussion
The results of this study, in conjunction with other studies (Nucci et al., 1996), demonstrate that concerns with autonomy and the prerogative to make decisions independently of parents are part of the thinking of Brazilian adolescents. Whereas prior work done in Brazil (Nucci et al., 1996) had focused on prototypical personal domain issues, the present study explored Brazilian adolescents’ judgments about more complex issues involving potential risks to the adolescent. Results from the present
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Camila Vital Menegaz and Veronica Perez for all their help in collecting and analyzing data, and Kirk Becker for advice on statistical analyses.
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