Elsevier

New Ideas in Psychology

Volume 39, October 2015, Pages 53-62
New Ideas in Psychology

Resistance to peer influence during adolescence: Proposing a sociocultural-developmental framework

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.07.005Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Developmentally-oriented peer resistance research is based in psychosocial theory.

  • We propose an alternative sociocultural-developmental framework.

  • The framework draws on constructionist and discursive sociocultural approaches.

  • It also draws on dialogical self theory for a systems perspective on development.

Abstract

Assumptions regarding the vulnerability of adolescents to peer influences permeate the academic and popular literatures, especially as explanations of adolescent risk taking. In developmentally-oriented research that has addressed age differences in peer resistance/conformity, a psychosocially-based account has prevailed which attributes higher resistance scores of older compared with younger adolescents to the development of autonomy and individuation. In this paper, we propose an alternative sociocultural-developmental framework for the study of peer resistances. Contributing to the framework are, first, sociocultural perspectives on resistance within cultural and feminist studies that have implications for peer resistance scholarship in their alternative conceptualization of person–context relations and the consequent reorientation of the nature of the questions as well as the methods appropriate for addressing these questions. We then draw on dialogical theory to extend these perspectives to a more comprehensive framework encompassing developing-persons-in-changing-contexts and illustrate the framework with a research example.

Section snippets

Overview of the research

Of the early work on the development of peer conformity/resistance during adolescence, Thomas Berndt's 1979 article has been acknowledged most frequently by subsequent investigators. This is due, in part, to his assessment of peer conformity via hypothetical situations, an assessment procedure that has been taken up or adapted by many others over the years. Beyond the measure, Berndt's (1979) research warrants attention for addressing the main question that has continued to be debated: What are

Complicating the concept of peer resistance

Here we consider perspectives on resistance that are consistent with the broad category of sociocultural approaches that Kirschner and Martin (2010) call discursive and constructionist. In general, these perspectives direct attention to the complexity and contextual specificity of influences and resistances, often as observed in interactional settings. Explicit in these views is rejection of the still fairly common implication within the adolescent literature of peer pressure or influence as a

Sociocultural-developmental framework

What we wish to propose in this section is that taking a sociocultural approach to the study of peer resistances needn't imply a restrictive focus on situated action and microgenesis to the exclusion of ontogenetic processes. It is possible to bring together contemporary “hybrid” constructionist and discursive positions (Raby, 2005) that offer insights on resistances and the study of ontogeny within a theoretically coherent sociocultural framework. In this section, we turn to another of

Summary

The main features of the proposed sociocultural-developmental framework are as follows:

  • 1.

    This framework connects with constructionist/discursive sociocultural approaches in the importance placed on process-oriented analyses of particular people acting in relation to particular contexts, including probing the details of exactly what is being resisted, and how resistances are expressed. It includes taking into consideration dialoguing with many aspects of context including the immediate setting and

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