Timely Characterization of Mother-Daughter and Family-School Relations: Narrative Understandings of Adolescence

AbstractJoining the call of lifespan developmental theory to study time, narrative analy-sis offers new opportunities for exploring development "in time" as lived and experienced. The narratives were collected as part of a qualitative study of relations between families and schools during adolescence and told by a second-ary teacher and mother of adolescents. The narrator expresses her feelings and beliefs as plot rather than recreating a prior sequence of events. The article addresses the multiple layers of characterization (author/interviewer, narrator/ mother and teacher, subject/her daughter) examining the terms and perspec-tives of each. Implications for developmental and educational theories are discussed. (Qualitative Research in Developmental Psychology and Education)