Gender issues in the interface of family experience and adolescents' friendship and dating identity

This study focuses on the role of family experience in adolescents' conception of the self in the context of friendship and dating relationships. Three issues are addressed: the extent of sex differences in adolescents' friendship and dating identity, how links between family experience and friendship and dating identity might differ for males and females, and whether mothers and fathers play distinctive roles in such development. A sample of Caucasian two-parent families, each including an adolescent who was a high school senior, was observed in a family interaction task designed to elicit the expression and coordination of a variety of points of view. Each adolescent was also given an interview assessing exploration and commitment in friendship and dating identity. Only one sex difference was found in identity, with females more committed in their conceptions of dating relationships than males. The key finding of the study concerns the distinctive patterns of family interaction associated with friendship and dating identity. For females, separateness in family interaction was related to their friendship identity exploration, whereas for males, the links between family interaction and exploration all involved connectedness. The different contingencies may reflect the interplay between different societal patterns of support and restriction of males' and females' exploration.This work was supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD-92819 and HD-17983) and the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health and from the University Research Institute and the Institute of Human Development and Family Studies of the University of Texas at Austin.Received her Ph.D. in child psychology from the University of Minnesota. Research interests include the role of family and peer relationships in the development of individual and relational competence, and the interface of family, peer, and school contexts in the development of children and adolescents.Received his Ph.D. in child psychology from the University of Minnesota. Research interests include the role of the family in adolescent personality development and identity formation, career development, and adoptive family relationships.     

The politics of the selective gaze: Closed Circuit Television and the policing of public space

This paper gives first an explanation for therapid development of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV)throughout Britain. This considers the implicationsof its rapid proliferation on the geographies ofpublic space and highlights the selectivity of thegaze of the surveillance cameras and the consequentpotential for the exclusion of certain groups frompublic space. The paper then extends this by usingresearch from two rural towns to address three basicquestions: how the cameras are used for direct lawenforcement; how this use is governed; and how thepublic react to the use of CCTV. It concludes that bystressing the selectivity of the surveillance anddrawing the implications of this for enforcement andgovernance, and also stressing the extent to which theplacing and timing of the use of the cameras fails toreflect the revealed preferences of the communitiesinvolved.