The telling or the tale? Narratives and gender in adolescent friendship networks

Abstract

The paper analyses the narratives told between adolescent friends, recorded in single‐sex friendship groups with a fieldworker. It confirms the importance of narratives in the construction of friendship and, specifically, in the interpretation of past experience according to peer group norms. The link between the self and others is different in the narratives told by the male friends and the female friends. The boys establish a sense of group identity through the joint activity of ‘telling’, whilst for the girls the links are between individual selves, constructed through their tales. Key figures in the friendship groups take the lead in demonstrating how events are interpreted. The same speaker uses styles that could be labelled ‘competitive’ and styles that could be labelled ‘cooperative’, depending on the interactional context.

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