Matthew D. Graham

Transition to Adulthood as a Parent-Youth Project: Governance Transfer, Career Promotion, and Relational Processes.

This study determined how youth (ages 17-21) and their parents jointly constructed and acted on goals and strategies pertinent to the transition to adulthood. Twenty parent-youth dyads were followed over an 8-month period using the qualitative action-project method. Data included their joint conversations, video recall of internal processes, self-monitoring logs, and researcher telephone monitoring. Detailed and repeated analysis of elements, functional steps, and goals resulted in the identification of an explicit joint project for each dyad that the participants saw as pertinent to the transition to adulthood. These projects referred broadly to the youth development of identity and social inclusion in the adult world and included the specific projects of career promotion, governance transfer, and parent-youth relational processes. The findings illustrate the complexity of the transition-to-adulthood process as well as its joint construction by parent and youth. Implications for practice include identifying and following the joint parent-youth transition project.

Addiction as a complex social process: An action theoretical perspective

This article introduces an action theoretical perspective of addiction. The view that addiction resides solely within the individual continues to foster significant limitations across addiction theorizing, research, and treatment. Exclusive focus on an individual neurobiological level of analysis precludes important additional layers of understanding, for example, the roles of individual and joint human actions, the socially constituting processes of addiction, and the role of gender. Our perspective is that a neurobiological view on addiction is insufficient without consideration of goals, intentionality, relationships, and meaning. Using a composite case scenario, we offer an action theoretical framework for understanding individual and joint addiction processes over time and within the context of other life processes. This integrative framework considers manifest behaviors, internal and communicative processes, and the social meaning of addiction. This article offers a practical application of the theory and draws broad implications for the conceptualization and subsequent language of addiction.

A Phenomenological Analysis of Spiritual Seeking: Listening to Quester Voices

Prominent scholars have appealed for the use of diverse research methodologies to enhance ongoing work in the psychology of religion and spirituality. This article represents, to our knowledge, the first phenomenological investigation into quest religiosity. Results confirm earlier suggestions by Klaassen and McDonald (2001) that multiple, complex pathways or manifestations of quest are conceivable. Expressions of quest were identified by descriptions of spiritual and/or religious experience from questers who also retained varying degrees of faith commitments. Results suggest that several dimensions of quest religiosity have not been sufficiently understood, including its relational costs and a dialectic between making and abandoning commitments. We suggest that these results build on ideological surround analysis of religious orientation by confirming key elements of the quest model while identifying biased assumptions that limit the adequacy of current quest conceptualization. Further qualitative and longitudinal investigations are needed to understand the nuanced, socially embedded expressions of quest religiosity.

Spiritual/Religious Coping as Intentional Activity: An Action Theoretical Perspective

Spiritual/religious coping has proven to be a fertile ground for investigating health-related spirituality in action. Ken Pargament and his colleagues have successfully demonstrated that spiritual/religious coping differs significantly from previously identified coping strategies. While much has been accomplished to date, there are undeveloped theoretical and methodological avenues that appear to provide important promise for understanding the complexities of this critical domain of coping. Some scholars have failed to conceptualize and research spiritual/religious coping as a contextual, temporally bounded process. This paper explores the theoretical and methodological advantages of adopting a contextually embedded, process-oriented epistemology—contextual action theory. We propose that doing so will not only address some of the inadequacies of the extant literature but also aid researchers in exploring novel dimensions of spiritual/religious coping. From a contextual action-theory perspective, spiritual/religious coping is viewed as intentional, goal-directed behaviour that is embedded in a social and relational context. This teleonomic reconceptualization enables researchers to understand the constitution and development of intentions involved in the process of spiritual/religious coping over time. Further, a contextual action theory perspective transcends the narrow, individualistic lens of coping and explores joint and collective coping processes that emerge as people draw upon spiritual/religious practices to cope with distress. Thus, spiritual/religious coping is embedded in social and relational context and as part of personal, intentional goal-directed processes over time. The novel contributions of a contextual theoretical perspective to spiritual/religious coping research and theory are illustrated through a case example.

Transition in the Context of Disability

Danni has special needs so I have been thinking about transitioning to adulthood since he was six years old, you know…, I always needed to provide him with a lot of guidance and special interventions. As far as transitioning to adulthood, it started with transitioning to independence and making a lot of difficult choices … setting him up to make choices is really important and teaching him life skills is really important. We have done a lot of things that other kids, I think haven’t done and um … like … what am I thinking of? … Going to see a dietician and an occupational therapist. Danni is really academic and he really gobbles up information but he doesn’t necessarily put it into practice…, also practicing and learning social skills … also Danni follows the straight and narrow and I try to expand his way of thinking. Like, offer some possibilities.

Using the Self-Confrontation Procedure in Counseling

Throughout this book, we rely extensively on the self-confrontation interview to understand the actions of youth, their parents, counselors, and other involved in the transition process. The research participants generated these self-confrontation interviews as they watched a video playback of the action in which they had just participated. For example, a mother watches the playback of her conversation with her son. The video is viewed with a researcher who stops the video approximately every minute. The researcher follows and respects the meaningfulness of the sequence being viewed and may stop it before or after the minute has elapsed. The researcher then asks the parent to recall her thoughts and feelings during that moment that they had just watched. The parent could also make any other comment about the segment viewed as long as it is clear to the interviewer whether the thought or feeling occurred then or now.

Working with Narrative and Interpretation

This chapter deals with two important counseling processes in working with youth in the transition to adulthood, narrative and interpretation. At first glance these processes may seem quite separate, but, as we shall point out in this chapter, they are closely linked not only in counseling but also in the lives of clients more broadly. Writing about action we also repeatedly refer in this book to narratives and mention interpretation. These obviously are expressions we use beyond everyday usage and connect a particular theoretical conceptualization with these terms and a practical procedure when working with empirical material (Young & Collin, 1992).

Studying Transition Processes

The way one conceptualizes the transition to adulthood suggests the methods that one would use to study it. For example, sociology’s life-course approach emphasizes how socially structured opportunities and limitations explain differences in the duration and sequencing of events associated with the transition to adulthood. The life-course approach studies the specific order of events that structure a person’s life, including life stages and transitions, as well as formal institutions and cultural values that contribute to that structure. Here a cause – effect relationship between limitations, opportunities, and some of the structurally defined properties of the transition (duration) are monitored and analyzed. Often retrospective recollection of the opportunities, limitations, and the duration of the transition provide data for the analysis.

Transition to Adulthood: Introduction

The transition to adulthood involves, for most individuals, moving from school to work, establishment of long-term relationships, possibly parenting, as well as a number of other psychosocial transformations. These are not small changes in individuals’ lives. Indeed, some aspects of the transition to adulthood, such as the establishment of long-term relationships or parenting, result in permanent or enduring transformations. The transition to adulthood is not only a period of “coming of age” but a time during which major choices are contemplated and decisions are made.

Transition to Adulthood as Goal-Directed Action

One of the many poignant scenes in Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, is the conversation between Happy and his mother, Linda. Linda is trying to convince her son that he has to commit to something in life; that he can not just sit around and not do anything. This conversation represents a segment of a transition to adulthood process – the mother–son conversation in which they are discussing his future. Similarly, the research literature on the transition to adulthood reviewed in Chapter 1 has pointed to transition as a process. It also showed that this process takes place over a longer period of time than once was the case, often a decade or more, well after 18 years of age. Third, what constitutes a successful transition to adulthood is less clear than it once was. Marriage, full-time employment, and leaving the family home are not the decisive markers of adulthood that they were even 50 years ago, the kind of markers that Linda Loman sought for her son.