Adolescent development interview essay: theory and quotes

This is three tasks in sequence and the order you do them in decides how good the paper can be. You review five theorists, you interview someone using instructor-approved questions, and then you write 750 to 1,000 words relating one theory to what they said. The temptation is to interview first and choose the theory afterwards, on the grounds that you cannot know what fits until you have the answers. That is backwards. The four required question areas are broad enough that a theory-blind interview produces pleasant reminiscence and very little you can analyse, while going in with a theory tells you which follow-up question to ask when something interesting surfaces. Pick provisionally, interview, and change your mind afterwards if the material demands it. The instructor approves the questions, not the theory, so nothing stops you from going in with one in mind and everything is easier if you do.

The five theorists are not interchangeable and choosing well is the largest single lever on this grade. Erikson gives you identity versus role confusion, which suits an interviewee who talks about who they were trying to be. Marcia converts that into something you can actually classify — four identity statuses defined by whether the person explored options and whether they committed — which makes it the most analysable choice, because a statement can be placed. Piaget suits an interview yielding abstract or hypothetical reasoning. Elkind's adolescent egocentrism, with its imaginary audience and personal fable, is excellent if your interviewee remembers feeling constantly watched. Kohlberg maps directly onto one of the required questions, since the interview must cover what influenced their moral development. Read a short account of two candidates before you sit down with the person, since the cost of that is an hour and the cost of the alternative is an interview you cannot use.

That mapping is worth making explicit before you write, because the assignment already tells you what the interview must cover: cognitive, physical and psychosocial development; peer influence; the people and events that shaped their morals; and how the adolescent experience formed the adult. Each of those is a door into a different theory. Peer influence and the sense of being observed lead to Elkind. Morals lead to Kohlberg. Cognitive change leads to Piaget. Who they became leads to Erikson or Marcia. Choose the theory whose door your interviewee walked through most willingly, rather than the one you understood best in the lecture, and the analysis section writes itself instead of having to be forced. The door metaphor is worth taking literally: your interviewee will answer one of those four areas at length and the others briefly, and that asymmetry is data about which theory to choose.

*Support your response with examples* is the instruction that separates the paper that works from the one that summarises. Examples means the interviewee's own words, quoted, and then interpreted. The commonest failure here is a competent description of the theory followed by a paragraph asserting that the interviewee went through those stages, with no evidence that anyone was interviewed at all. Build the analytical section as a repeated three-part move: state the theoretical claim, quote the sentence that bears on it, then say what the quotation shows and what it does not. Three of those cycles will fill the space better than a chronological retelling of the conversation, and each one is visibly doing the thing the assignment asked for. Three cycles will also read as a paper with an argument, where a chronological account reads as a transcript with commentary attached to it.

One analytical point will lift this above most submissions and costs a sentence. Your interviewee is an adult recalling adolescence, so what you have is a reconstructed narrative shaped by everything that happened since, not a record of what occurred. Naming that limitation is honest, it is the kind of thing developmental researchers say about retrospective data, and it usefully protects you when a memory does not fit the theory — you can treat the mismatch as interesting rather than hiding it. On proportions: at 750 to 1,000 words, keep the theory description to roughly 200 words and the interviewee description to about 100, leaving 500 or more for the analysis, which is the only section the marker cannot get from a textbook. Those proportions are worth checking with a word count rather than by eye, because the theory description is the section that quietly expands while you are writing it.