Middleground: Body, identity, and relationship in girls' narratives of early puberty and maturation

This dissertation presents a retrospective study of early developing girls' narratives of puberty. Fifty-five African American and White girls from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds attending three high schools were surveyed to identify an interview sample of 16 participants who met criteria for early puberty. The survey was used to scaffold participants' comfort with disclosing private information on puberty, glean demographic material, collect comparative data for assessing validity, and collect information on beliefs about puberty, their bodies, and relational experiences. Following this, multiple interviews were conducted with this sub-sample on the topics of identity, relationships, and the body during and following early puberty to answer the following: How does a sample of early developing girls construct female puberty and development, girlhood, and the female body, in terms of their experience and more broadly?; Analysis consisted of several iterative phases. A codebook of 70 descriptive and interpretive codes was created from salient topics in the literature on girls' development and emerging themes from surveys and interviews. Using NVivo, this codebook was applied to narrative profiles developed for each interview participant for retrieval of data corresponding to the codes. Cross-case memos were then composed to explicate the relationships between codes and to identify similarities and differences between participants.; This dissertation consists of an introduction and five articles. The first article examines the methodological implications of interviews with youth on sensitive topics. The second illustrates the ambiguous conceptions of girlhood and femininity with which these American girls engage through their ambivalent narratives of puberty. The third article offers a new consideration for classroom dynamics---pubertal diversity---and early developing girls' peer networks, in which difference from same sex peers' pubertal status led to shame, while peers' envy was also a source of pride. The fourth article discusses the role of prior childhood adversity in the participants' pubertal narratives, whereby early maturation took on multiple meanings in the context of the developmental demands of childhood stress. Finally, the fifth article examines participants' attitudes toward hormonal treatment of early puberty, focusing on issues of normalcy and difference. Methodological, practical, and theoretical implications are discussed throughout these articles.