"Adolescent Culture," Convenient Myth or Reality? A Comparison of Students and Their Teachers

The central hypotheses of this study were developed to test the assertion that adolescents maintain a separate and distinct set of values and norms from adults on a number of dimensions. The dimensions on which the adults and adolescents were assumed to differ were derived from a review of the works of Parsons, Eisenstadt, Bronfenbrenner, Coleman, and England. From a review of these authors' works, nine situational dilemma questions were derived, the answers to which were expected to differ between high-school students and their teachers. An index was constructed using five of the situational dilemma dimensions and this index was found to distinguish between student and teacher value systems. The effects of several other factors on index scores were also examined including: grade of students, sex of students and teachers, race of students, and the number of years teachers had been teaching at the school.