The body of the paper should not exceed five pages. Organize your paper as follows, including headings for each section: Title Page. Introduction: Include an overview of the contents, with a brief summary and background information on the case study. Case Study Analysis: Presenting Challenges: Explain the presenting challenge or challenges and primary issue or issues. Lifespan Theory: Analyze lifespan development theories to determine the most appropriate theory or theories to apply to the case study. Intervention Process: Apply the appropriate lifespan development theory to support an identified intervention process. Individual and Cultural Differences: Describe the potential impact of individual and cultural differences on development for the current age and context described in the case study. Conclusion: Summarize the case study context, challenges, and interventions. References: Cite in current APA format at least five peer-reviewed articles in addition to the course text as needed to support your assertions. Additional Requirements Written communication: Written communication should be free of errors that detract from the overall message. APA formatting: References and citations should be formatted according to current APA style and format. See Evidence and APA. Number of references: Your paper should include at least five properly cited peer-reviewed articles in addition to the textbook in which the case study is embedded. Length: 5–6 double-spaced pages of content in addition to the title page and reference page. Font and font size: Times New Roman, 12 points. use link for readings pages 427-460 Case Study Mark Spencer is a White, 16-year-old sophomore at a suburban public school. He lives with his mother, father, and older brother in a middle-class community. Mark has attended the local public schools since kindergarten, and until 8th grade he was an above-average student who frequently made honor roll. Mark’s father Doug commutes to his job at an insurance company and in recent years has increased his hours at the office as his company has downsized and shifted responsibilities to remaining employees. His mother Joanne works as a secretary at a local real estate agency. Mark’s brother Dave is a senior who is also an above-average student and who has been very active in intermural sports, especially soccer and baseball. During middle school, Mark had a strong interest in scouting and was particularly involved in camping and developing survival skills. Several of Mark’s friends in the scout troop left scouting in the 7th grade and began spending more time hanging out with girlfriends and playing sports. Mark continued scouting until 8th grade, but teasing from his friends became unbearable, and he finally gave up. Mark was shy with girls and not particularly interested in sports, so he was left with little in common with his middle school friends. At the same time, his grades began to slip. When Mark’s parents expressed concern about his poor grades, he told them that his teachers were jerks and his classes were boring. Although Doug and Joanne tried to encourage him to study more and to continue scouting or to try sports, Mark would generally react angrily, and his parents would back off to not upset him further. By 9th grade he was spending more and more time alone, playing video games and watching television in his room. When Mark turned 16, he begged for a car, and his parents agreed. Because they were so busy, Doug and Joanne felt it would be helpful to give Mark more independence, and they hoped it would increase his social acceptance. Mark was one of the first students in the sophomore class to turn 16, and he found that his old friends’ interest in him was piqued when he began driving his new car to school. Mark began to hang out with his old friends, and began smoking, drinking, and experimenting with drugs. His grades slipped further, although with almost no effort he was able to maintain a C average. Once again his parents became concerned about his grades, particularly because college loomed. They even threatened to remove the television from his room, but, as usual, they backed down when confronted by his anger. Doug and Joanne were also loath to rock the boat when Mark finally seemed to be enjoying his social life. He was no longer moping around the house, watching TV, and worrying his parents. When Mark asked to be allowed to drive his friends to a concert in a nearby city, with plans to spend the weekend at the home of a friend’s uncle, his parents disagreed about how to handle his request. Joanne was afraid of giving him so much freedom and worried about the safety of the group. Doug, remembering how restrictive his own parents were, argued that “you’re only young once” and that “you have to hope that what you’ve taught them up to now will stick, because that’s all you can do. At 16, kids are really on their own.” The weekend trip was a disaster. After the concert, the group partied at the uncle’s home, without adult supervision. Neighbors called the police about the noise. Parents were notified after the police found evidence of underage drinking. Mark persuaded his parents that he did not know the uncle would be away and that he had no control over his friends’ drinking. Doug and Joanne gave Mark the benefit of the doubt, but a month later, Joanne found a bottle of vodka hidden in Mark’s room. Both parents realized that they needed to seek help. Discussion Questions 1. Consider the developmental path that Mark has followed. Describe the elements that have been influential in shaping this adolescent’s experience. 2. Describe and comment on the parenting style used by Doug and Joanne. Evaluate the parents’ approach to Mark throughout his early adolescence and suggest ways they might have responded differently. 3. What role could the school have played in modifying the course of Mark’s development? 4. What specific suggestions for treatment might you make for Mark and his family? Adolescent Autonomy and Social Identity 1. The profound physical, cognitive, and social changes that accompany entry into adolescence can create a state of instability. Establishing independence requires some separation from caregivers on a psychological level. Simultaneously, teens increase their affiliation with and dependency on peers, who become more central to their social world. The Peer Arena 2. Peers are a source of support, of social comparison, and of identification. Adolescents borrow from their peers’ ways of behaving and thinking and provide an arena for identity formation. 3. Peer contact is helpful to adolescents because it provides support on the road to greater autonomy. However, some kinds of contact, like peer victimization and exposure to deviant behavior, can result in internalizing and externalizing disorders. The Structure of the Peer Network 4. Most adolescents have a few best friends, who are part of a clique of individuals who tend to do things together. Larger groups composed of many cliques comprise crowds, whose members may not be friends but share interests, attitudes, behaviors, and appearance. 5. Most American high schools are characterized by fairly similar crowd structures, consisting of populars and jocks, some alienated groups such as druggies, an average crowd, and an academically high-achieving group. 6. Crowds influence their members, but they are also freely selected by their members, who choose to participate in shared norms, roles, and expectations. Both selection and influence processes operate. 7. Crowds also exist in other cultures and in post-secondary settings, but specific groups (., jocks, etc.) and outcomes related to membership may differ. 8. Youth who belong to multiple crowds have higher social identity complexity, which is related to more prosocial intergroup relationships and less in-group/out-group bias. The Role of Parents Because I’m the Parent, That’s Why… 9. Parent–child conflicts increase during adolescence. Conflicts often arise around issues of control; parents and teens may hold different perceptions of rights and responsibilities. Parents are perceived to have more legitimate authority in the moral domain than in the personal domain. Prudential issues often are in dispute because they overlap with legitimate safety concerns and areas of privacy and personal choice. 10. Teens become more secretive as they get older and avoid sharing information because they may not want to upset their parents or be denied access to friends or activities. Youth protect information by not sharing some details with parents, avoiding conversations, or lying. Raising Adolescents 11. Research has focused on whether certain kinds of parenting at adolescence may be more predictive of positive outcomes and have found that both warmth (responsiveness) and control (demandingness) are as important with adolescents as they are with younger children. This kind of authoritative parenting is associated with, among other things, higher achievement, self-confidence, self-esteem, social adjustment, and self-control. 12. Parental knowledge is related to adjustment and less risky behavior than parental monitoring. Parental monitoring does not directly improve disclosure and may impede it. Warm and supporting parental relationships with adolescents are more predictive of adolescent sharing. Parental monitoring has several dimensions, including control. Psychological control is particularly harmful to youth across cultures. Adolescents in School 13. Declines in academic orientation and motivation are noted in early adolescence and may be associated with shifting school structures and processes as children enter middle school or junior high school. Larger classes and schools, whole-group lectures, and heavy emphasis on competition are among these practices. Also, some kinds of parental involvement decline sharply at secondary school levels, despite evidence that it remains just as important for teens’ achievement as for that of younger children. 14. Schools have attempted to translate the research findings on authoritative parenting to schools. Those secondary schools that prioritize affective and motivational supports, like warm teacher–student relationships, have better outcomes than those with high expectations alone. 15. Participation in crowds that support academic achievement can be helpful for those students whose parents are disengaged. This suggests the role that crowds can play in many important outcomes. Leisure, Work, and Media 16. Involvement in school- or community-sponsored out-of- school activities is associated with better achievement and adjustment overall. However, some deleterious effects, like poorer achievement, have been related to some kinds of extracurricular activities. 17. Like leisure, research on paid employment for adolescents is mixed. In general, some paid work can be helpful, but spending substantial hours working is associated with lower school achievement, less involvement in school activities, more drug and alcohol use, and more delinquency. Some cultural differences have also been found. 18. High rates of media use are associated with obesity, sleep problems, underachievement, early initiation of risky behaviors like smoking and drinking, cyberbullying, sexting (sending sexually explicit messages or images via text message), and depression. More positive outcomes include ability to be connected to others and to access helpful information. 19. Playing violent video games is a clear risk factor for aggressive thoughts, feelings, and actions. TV and movies are prime outlets for sexual information for youth. Other forms of interpersonal violence, like dating/sexual victimization, are a serious problem for adolescents. 20. Adolescents, their peers, families, and schools are affected by the larger culture, and vice versa. Present culture may not be very “adolescent friendly” due to loss of community and a focus on individualism and material success. Negative media forces seem to shape attitudes and beliefs. Teens are increasingly exposed to violence, sex, and commercial messages through the media, affecting what they view as normative and acceptable behavior. Thus, media messages often compete with other, more traditional messages from families and schools, and research demonstrates that media messages do influence teens’ beliefs and behaviors. Risk-Taking versus Risky Lifestyles in Adolescence 21. Risky behavior increases sharply during adolescence, peaking at about age 17. Some rates of risky behavior have declined or held steady since 2011. Other problems, like depression, have increased. A moderate level of parental control, compared to little control or very high levels of control, is related to less risky behaviors in adolescents. 22. Risky behavior may also provide some advantages in the teen years, making it, in some cases, adaptive. It can sometimes serve as an indicator of individuation and self-determination and as a source of peer acceptance. Thus, risk taking has both positive and negative aspects. It may be inevitable in cultures with “broad” socialization practices, which encourage high levels of individual freedom. 23. Some research suggests that a developmental shift might be occurring. Youth are engaging in adult (sometimes risky) behaviors less frequently than in previous generations as well as in more solitary time with media. This is hypothesized to be due to a slow life strategy that is related to longer periods of education and later childbearing. Society’s Role in Adolescent Problem Behavior: Then and Now 24. Although the United States provides high levels of freedom to adolescents, it may not provide adequate supports to ensure that risk taking is within reasonable limits and that positive youth development is supported. In the 1920s, concerns about adolescent risk taking fostered a sense of community responsibility to provide adequate supervision and healthy outlets for young people, and a number of youth-oriented institutions sprang up offering free services to teens. Today such community support systems are often in short supply, and costly when they are available. The current approach seems to be based on a reconceptualization of the issue. Risky behavior is now viewed as a problem of the individual rather than a problem of society.
