Urban Girls: Resisting Stereotypes, Creating Identities - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814751083 ISBN 13: 9780814751084

Publisher: NYU Press, 1996

Synopsis

Sociologists have tried to analyze adolescents as long as the discipline has existed. However, most studies have focused on suburban youth, ignoring a large segment of the population, the urban adolescent.

Urban Girls tries to reverse this trend. The researchers included in this ambitious project realize there is more to adolescence than the suburban experience. The city has unique effects on the people who live there, and they on it. Drawing on experts from across the country, Urban Girls investigates what it is like to be young in an American city. This book also explores the minority experience in America. It is wonderful to see studies of Black and Latina youth that do not automatically label them as future convicts, drug dealers, or with other negative stereotypes.
--The American Reporter

Traditional psychology textbooks have ignored the normative development of urban girls and the unique situations they face on a daily basis. Lumped together with their suburban, mostly white and middle class counterparts, their voices are frequently subsumed within the larger study of adolescent development. Urban Girls is the first book to directly focus on the development of urban poor and working class adolescent girls.

Including both quantitative and qualitative essays, and including contributions from psychologists, sociologists, and public health scholars, this volume explores the lives of a diverse group of girls from varying ethnic and class backgrounds. Topics covered include the identity development of Caribbean-American girls, the role of truth telling in the psychological development of African-American girls, relationships between mothers and daughters of different races and ethnicities, friendships, sexuality, health risks, career development, and other subjects of importance to human development. Filling a gap in the literature of human development, Urban Girls is sure to be of use to psychologists, sociologists, and social workers.

About this title

Review:

"Opens up new conceptual horizons for exploring gender and sexuality. . . . In stimulating readers to think 'outside the box' of established academic notions of sexuality and gender, Sex and Sexuality in Latin America illustrates the sometimes mind-boggling mission of iconoclastic scholarship. The well-written essays are thought-provoking analyses on the cutting edge of gender scholarship."-"Latin American Research Review", vol. 36, no. 3, 2001,

About the Author:

Bonnie J. Leadbeater is Professor of Psychology at the University of Victoria and co-author, with Niobe Way, of Urban Girls and of Growing up Fast. She is also co-editor of Investing in Children, Youth, Families and Communities: Strengths-Based Research and Policy, Resilience in Children, Families, and Communities: Linking Context to Intervention and Policy, and Ethical Issues in Community-Based Research with Children and Youth.

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0814751083
• ISBN 13: 9780814751084
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 398
• Editor: Leadbeater Bonnie J., Way Niobe