Pursuing interest in and across contexts: Adolescents’ experiences over the course of two and a half years

Abstract

This thesis demonstrated how pursuing interest entails more than having a preference for an object, and always brings along contextuality, i.e., Temporally, Epistemically, Materially, Geographically, Socially, Institutionally, and Culturally dependencies. Additionally, we showed that life-wide and social dynamics need to be considered when wanting to understand adolescents’ interest development and sustainment. Since pursuing interest can entail very different things, for different adolescents and/or objects of interests, the inherent contextuality is best not to qualify a priori but in interest pursuits as labelled and described by adolescents’ themselves. Next, this thesis demonstrated how pursuing interest is relational, within our (daily) one-to-one interactions and within society at large, in which all our lives are situated. This may imply that pursuing interest might be best viewed as adolescents’ way of navigating individual preferences, constraints, and opportunities related to their interest and their daily lives. Concluding, we show how it is critical for adolescents to self-define their interest label, yet not to overestimate that labels are not self-explanatory to fully understand and capture what pursuing interest entails for individual adolescents. Interest pursuits are what adolescents take into account when making life decisions, e.g., when starting an educational program (or not), and are what shape who adolescents are and want to be (e.g., do I want to be a skater, with everything that comes along). Where, in the current debate, diversity is sometimes limited to diversity of identities, this thesis emphasizes the need and justification to embrace a (large) variety and diversity of places, spaces and human interactions, to help adolescents navigate their interests by creating opportunities and breaking down constrains. Additionally, we challenge researchers to include the multiple contexts and (social) dynamics when studying adolescents’ interest (and other complex social concepts), in order to generate ecologically valid, meaningful insights.