Persist or Perish in the Qualitative Studies of Adolescents: 
Strategies to Win a Silent Negotiation

Heewon Chang
The University of Georgia


     In qualitative studies of adolescents, negotiation with
teenagers is almost a survival skill, not usually taught in
research method classes.  Nevertheless, success in the
negotiation shapes researchers' relationships with the informants
and ultimately the quality of data.  This paper introduces a new
concept of silent negotiation to describe the process of
establishing and maintaining rapport with adolescent informants. 
Drawing upon my three cross-cultural studies of American, Korean,
and Korean-American adolescents, I discuss four strategies of
negotiation that helped me to persist in fieldwork and
successfully maintain rapport with young people.
Characteristics of Silent Negotiation with Adolescents
     Negotiation is ubiquitous in qualitative studies. 
Researchers initially negotiate with "official gatekeepers"
(i.e., administrators of an organization with which potential
informants are affiliated) to gain entr‚e to a site and then with
"unofficial gatekeepers" (e.g., the potential informants) to gain
social acceptance, which is often a key to the wealth of new
knowledge (Whyte, 1984).  Some literature on fieldwork methods
does not sufficiently address negotiation as an important aspect
of study (Crane & Angrosino, 1984), whereas others differentiate
the initial negotiation ("entering the field") from the later one
("establishing rapport") (Taylor & Bogdan, 1984).      Generally,
a negotiation process engages at least two parties who try to
come to an agreement to obtain mutual benefit.  Once they have
come to terms, in either written or spoken words, the involved
parties "rest," assuming the decision will be in effect. 
Negotiation in the study of adolescents resembles this general
process in the sense that two parties--adolescent(s) and
researcher(s)--bargain for their benefits.  However, the process
with adolescent informants deviates from the definition in the
way that it neither stops after an initial negotiation nor
depends on articulated agendas all the time.  In addition,
researchers frequently find themselves in a mute, yet tense
bargaining situation with teenagers to obtain their goals.
     Negotiation with adolescents is an ongoing process in the
sense that researchers do not "rest" after obtaining an initial
consent of participation from teenagers.  This agreement may
include the polite, passive cooperation but does not guarantee
the social acceptance that would allow researchers to penetrate
the infra-structure of the adolescent culture.  Therefore, the
researchers persistently try to secure trust from their
informants, socially engaging themselves in the teenage life. 
Negotiation also continues even after gaining social acceptance
from one group of adolescents if the researchers plan to study a
wide range of teenagers.  Young people are well known for their
clique- forming behaviors (Chang 1992; Cusick 1973; Eckert 1989;
Peshkin 1978; Varenne 1982).  Cliques are so self-contained that
researchers may have to gain separate entr‚e from
gatekeepers--unofficial--of each group.
     Negotiation with adolescents is also a guessing game.  The
inarticulation in the process and teenagers' inconsistency
contribute to the complexity of estimation.  After initial
consent act, negotiating parties do not always depend on words to
come to terms with their respective goals.  Researchers may hope
to gain profound social acceptance from teenagers, which would
lead to in-depth and reliable information; the teenagers may
expect friendship and possibly monetary or material rewards among
other things.  While researchers are likely to have well defined
the expected gains, the reciprocity to teenagers is not always
articulated, especially in the adolescent own terms.  The lack of
teenagers' articulation may be attributed by the
initiator-respondent relationship and the imbalance of
negotiation power between adults and teenagers.  Therefore, the
teenagers' hidden agenda and satisfaction level need to be
nonverbally communicated:  intuition is the rule of the game; 
trial and error is the process.  In my studies, I consciously
gauged the acceptability of my presence and behavior and became
very sensitive to the teenagers' response to me.  On the basis of
my perception of our relationships, I adjusted my behavior hoping
they would respond to my changes.
     The guessing game with the silent partners was further
complicated when adolescents acted inconsistently.  For example,
some teenagers in my Oregon study acted overly friendly on one
day and aloof on the next day (Chang 1992). Among many reasons, I
suspect the teenagers' seemingly inconsistent acts--either
short-term or long- term--resulted from their own uncertainty
about themselves or their conscious act of impression management
(Goffman, 1959 as cited in Berreman, 1962).  For whichever
reasons, this never-self-explained inconsistency disturbed my
sense of acceptance among the teenagers.  My reassessment caused
me to readjust my perception of relationships with the adolescent
informants, which constitutes another cycle of silent
renegotiation. 

Three Cross-Cultural Studies
     These characteristics of negotiation with adolescents seem
to underlie my three cross- cultural studies although students'
acceptance of me varied.      The first study (here referred to
as the Oregon study, Chang 1992) was designed to provide
ethnographic accounts of the ethos of American high school
adolescents reflected in daily lives in and out of school. 
Beginning January, 1987 for one year, fieldwork was conducted in
a semi-rural, predominantly white high school and its surrounding
community in Oregon.  At the beginning, I presented myself as a
researcher and plunged into the unfamiliar crowd of students as
"one of their kind."  Throughout the study, I was perceived by
the teenagers in several ways: as their friend, a marginal
character between teenager and adult, or an adult associate of
their parents.      The second study (here referred to as the
Korean study, Chang 1989) was conducted in Seoul, Korea for three
months in 1989-90, focusing on the self-esteem of female students
attending an academically low-track commercial high school.  I
gained entr‚e to the school through the co-investigator,
Professor Eui-Sook Cho.  I spent the entire on-site period in an
11th grade classroom.  In Korean schools, students stay in one
classroom throughout the day and teachers of different subjects
move from classroom to classroom for each period.  Since age and
marital status determine human relationships in Korea, it was
impossible for me to present myself as the students' potential
friend.  I had to settle with the next best possible
relationship--between "“n-ni" and "dong-s?g".  The former term
is used by a female to refer to an older female sibling/person;
the latter used by both genders to refer to a younger
sibling/person.  Since a minimal age gap is relevant to the usage
of these terms outside a kin relationship, I had to keep my
actual age and marital status secret.  Some girls accepted my
approach and others seemed to feel uneasy about this unusual
encounter.  My assigned seat in the classroom encouraged frequent
contacts with neighboring students but, in turn, restricted
opportunities to extend friendship to others sitting in a
distance.      The third study (here called the Korean-American
study) began as a pilot study while I was volunteering for four
months in 1991 to assist with school-home communication between a
high school in a suburb of Philadelphia and Korean parents.  I
expressed an interest in this type of assistance,
enthusiastically received by school administrators because they
had experienced problems in communicating with their ethnic
Korean students' parents who often had minimal competency in
English.  Since I had not yet assumed a full-scale ethnographic
research during this period, I presented myself to the
Korean-American students (children of recent Korean immigrants)
as a volunteer, not as a researcher.  My main assignment was to
telephone to inform parents of their children's excessive
unexcused absences and tardies that might jeopardize their
academic status unless halted quickly.  While on campus one day a
week, I collected preliminary data regarding the bicultural
adjustment of Korean-American students.  Some students were
friendly at first while others were disinterested in my presence;
the unexpected reputation as a "tattle-taler" (my trained guess)
damaged relationship with some students, even with some of them
who were initially friendly. 

Four "Winning" Strategies
     In the three studies, I utilized four strategies that helped
me to gain acceptance and maintain cordial relationship with
adolescents in the silent negotiation.  The strategies included
naivety, invisibility, persistence, and flexibility.  These were
"winning," not in the sense that I subdued my negotiation
counterpart, but in that I continued to secure the trustful
relationship with the teenage informants. 
     "Naivety" refers to "acting naive", suggested as one of the
field tactics in Taylor and Bogdan (1984: 45). The art of this
rule is to present oneself as someone, who has so minimal
competency in a new environment as to need great assistance, but
not to exaggerate such incompetency untruthfully.  Since
outsiders are "expected to possess a degree of naivete about the
setting" (Taylor and Bogdan: 45), this "step-down" approach (Agar
1980) is likely to illicit energetic responses from teenagers
with little suspicion.  This strategy worked well in the Oregon
study.  My foreign appearance and accent, and verbal assurance
convinced the adolescents of my inexperience with an American
school.  Their presumption of my total incompetency facilitated
the negotiating process.  Acting naive among students in the
Korean school proved to be more difficult, because they presumed
my familiarity with the Korean educational system.  I tactfully
pointed out the changes in the adolescent culture since my high
school days and the novelty of commercial high schools to me.  In
the third study, some Korean-American students accepted my
ignorance of their culture in the U.S. school, although my
English proficiency (better than theirs) left others undecided. 
The farther the reality was from the teenagers' presumption of my
status, the more complicated the negotiation for social
acceptance became.
     The second strategy was staying as invisible as possible
among informants.  Staying invisible refers to playing the role
of an unobtrusive observer and presenting oneself as a follower
rather than a leader who could be regarded as a potential
competitor. Playing the perfect observer is impossible--not even
desirable--in qualitative research.  However, playing a too
active participant's role can distort the dynamics of an existing
structure. My data collection in school relied largely upon
observation, with minimal participation.  When actively engaged
in teenage activities, I either lost myself in the activities or
felt alienated from my informants.  Therefore, my general rule
was, "Be there as a shadow." 
     The third strategy was persistence.  Since the way of my
presence in the high schools was unusual, it caused several kinds
of suspicions among students.  Some of the Oregon students
initially thought of me as a narcotics control officer while
others mistook me as a foreign exchange student.  Female students
in my Korean study could not comprehend my identity beyond
somebody who had a connection with a university, possibly a
student teacher.  The Korean-American students considered me as a
hired hand to "tattle" their attendance problems to their
parents. Sometimes I voluntarily overlooked the teenagers'
misunderstanding of my identity as a researcher; other times, I
tried to correct misconceptions that would threaten the accuracy
of data.  Negotiating my status among adolescents required
persistence. 
     The final strategy was flexibility.  In both the U.S. and
Korean high schools, but more so in the former, I noticed that
the social statuses of individuals were influenced by clique
association.  The same principle applied to the determination of
my status.  Consequently, if I had "hung out" exclusively with a
certain group of students, I would have been labeled accordingly. 
Since my concern in both studies was to penetrate into a large
body of students, not a few cliques, I tried to present myself as
a "free-lancer".  I made a conscious effort to make contacts with
a wide range of students to build a reputation as a socially
flexible person.  This undefined status might have puzzled some
students; yet, it paid off when I tried to interact with
cross-clique adolescents. Conclusion
     Adolescents responded to my negotiating attempts by either
playing my game or totally ignoring me. Teenagers--skillful
negotiators themselves--tightened or loosened the string of their
cultural information sacks according to their perceptions of me. 
I do not believe they were always conscious of controlling the
outflow of information.  Sometimes, however, they willingly
practiced impression management strategies such as "the discourse
of politeness, minimization of dire consequences, and preclusion
or exclusion from possible embarrassment" (Chang 1992: 194-196). 
Some students showed enormous support and interest in my study. 
Their social acceptance also affected the quality and amount of
cultural data I collected.
     By negotiating and renegotiating, both teenagers and I were
continually forced to reconstruct our perceptions of each other. 
For example, when working with Korean students, I had to
negotiate with them to modify cultural assumptions regarding age
so that our age difference would not interfere with establishing
rapport.  In order to help ease their adjustment to the new
concept of having horizontal friendship, rather than hierarchical
respect, with an older person, I had to negotiate with my measure
of professional ethics.  I chose to conceal both my actual age
and marital status.  By this negotiation, the high school girls
altered their perception of adults as to me.  I also had to
reconstruct my perception of the teenagers, not as my inferiors
but as working partners.
     Although the four strategies worked for all of my studies,
negotiation was never be executed out of context.  Situational
factors interplayed in the negotiation process:  for example, the
way I began the studies and the role I played in the field.  In
both the Oregon study and the Korean study, I began fieldwork as
a researcher.  Although few teenagers understood the concept of
social research, they found the activities unthreatening.  In
addition, since I declined any student guides designated by
official gatekeepers to help me (Cusick 1976; Kozol 1991), I was
left to explore the unfamiliar crowd of students and make free
contacts with minimal biases.  However, the Korean- American
study revealed a different consequence because I began the study
as a volunteer who was perceived, as I figured out later, as
their enemy.  This kind of initial approach cost me in-depth
friendships with most of the students, especially with those
whose interests were affected by my presence.  As a reaction, I
tried to engage the students to a more conscious negotiation to
correct their perception of me.  Yet, the byproduct of working
closely with the staff was a invaluable insight into the adult
perspectives of the issue, which I had little access to during
the Oregon and Korean studies.  Responding to research contexts,
I had to manage the negotiation strategies differently, with
emphasis on one strategy over others, or with different
combinations.  This task of customizing negotiation strategies
demanded a great deal of cultural sensitivity. 
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