AN ETHNOGRAPHIC INVESTIGATION OF A TEENAGE CULTURE IN A MONTESSORI JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL

This dissertation presents an ethnographic study of a teenage culture in a Montessori junior high school. Ethnographic research usually includes both interviews and observations. The standard methodological procedure is to first elicit from cultural participants their perceptions of meanings; then, second, this elicited information provides an analytical framework with which to identify and interpret observed enactments of patterned behavior. This study describes the first only; that is, an array of ethnographic elicitations and an analysis of them. The initial task was to develop interview procedures suitable for young people between the ages of eleven and thirteen. Three techniques were developed and employed to assemble a data base of cultural information. Analysis of that data base revealed the importance of two organizational principles in terms of which the junior high students conducted their daily cultural affairs: "personality and moods" and "trust". Their affairs took place within and between friendship groups. A friendship group consisted of those who shared various degrees of compatible "personalities and moods" and who could be variously trusted not to betray private friendship information. The students recognized a range of several types of friends from the least trusted "people you know" to the most trusted "best friends". These students daily set up situations of trust. They daily tested each other's willingness to hold information as confidential and thereby succeeded through the friendship ranks based on their mutual compatibility of "personality and moods" and on their willingness to trust and be trusted. Others who were "disliked" or hated had incompatible "personalities" and could never trust one another. They either ignored one another or had occasional fights.