From the manufacturing of school choices to support information resources: adolescent discourse under analysis

Abstract

Within an already completed project on vocational choices made by students entering secondary education in Portugal, a finding has deserved our particular attention: the renunciation of influence, that is, the belief that the choice made was free from any kind of influence, which emerged as a common value shared by all the young people surveyed. Based on our quantitative data (a questionnaire survey with 1,793 secondary school students) and qualitative data (24 individual semi-structured interviews with students at the same level of education), collected under this project, this article seeks to (re)frame the denial of external influences on the school trajectory definition in the context of building the self in adolescence. We will do this by comparing the autonomy claimed by adolescents with the sources of influence that participate and support that choice. Therefore, throughout the article, we will identify who the interlocutors of students in the process of (re)defining their vocations are, which information media they resort to to support their choices and which degree of importance is attributed to such sources of information. The data presented allows us to better understand the complexity of the processes of individuation in adolescence, by framing the legitimate discourse of self-affirmation in the dense web of social relations in which it takes place, highlighting the unique role played by the school world, family and by the media.