Adolescents’ interest experience in daily life in and across family and peer contexts

Abstract

This study examined daily experiences of interest in and across the social contexts of family and in-and out-of-school peers. Forty-two Dutch adolescents, aged 13-15 years, provided us with 2 weeks of experience sampling data on their engagement in interesting topics and activities throughout their daily lives. Findings show that adolescent daily life included a diverse range of parallel interests. School-related interests made up a substantial part of adolescents' daily lives, challenging the idea of mere disengagement of secondary school students in academics. Findings also show that some interests are strongly bound to a specific context, while others appear across family and peer contexts. This indicates how multiple contexts can simultaneously feed interests, something that calls for further acrosscontext research of interest development.

The Multidimensional Structure of Interest

“…With regard to school interests, we see multiple academic interests in all six profiles (though in varying quantities), and therefore the general conclusions of the study also yield for academic interests. The school interests categorized into the top and high flat profiles are especially relevant, as they challenge the generally held belief that students commonly lack individual interest in school subjects (as also found by Slot, Akkerman, & Wubbels, 2019). As a consequence, educators might do well to determine the baseline subject-related interests of their students, in order to judge the necessity of triggering new, situational interest, or the possibility of appealing to existing, individual interests.…”

How Do Young People Understand Their Own Self-Harm? A Meta-synthesis of Adolescents’ Subjective Experience of Self-Harm

“…The role of friends and peers in identity formation. During adolescence, the main references for choices, role exploration and identification are no longer the primary care givers but friends and peers, boy-or girlfriends, school and sport interests, and the society in general (Erikson, 1968;Slot, Akkerman, & Wobbels, 2019). In early adolescence, an important topic is to find out if they are same or different from friends and peers -"am I inside or outside this group".…”

The Enhancement of Creative Collaboration through Human Mediation

“…The theme "I am who I am" had two phases: the first corresponding to the activity of Project 1, which took place during the first academic period of 2018/19, and the second together with the curricular activity of Professional Formation, with 120 predefined hours of the annual plan of curricular activities of the 12th year for a total of 30 lessons at the António Arroio Art School, which took place during the second period. The aim was to observe how the students would embrace the project and to understand if the theme was appropriate and interconnected with their interests [17,18,31,32], providing participation and involvement on the part of the students, elevating them to a commitment of self-regulation in the making of the various activities, activities oriented to elaborating three-dimensional objects under the pedagogical team's responsibility of teachers: Carla Isidro, Rita Anahory, and Teresa Varela.…”

“…Some factors, also mentioned in studies by Alencar [4] and Oliveira [28], were recognised by students as being the most relevant to their personal development and the drivers of their creative practices. This data survey, relevant in terms of getting to know the perspectives of the students regarding their learning processes, was also referenced in other studies by Kinchin [24], Krapp [32] and Slot [31]. The questions took into consideration theoretical and empirical studies [4,23,29] on facilitators and inhibitors of creativity in the educational context.…”

“…This work reveals the first relationship between themselves and their own family, considering the students' ages, between 16 and 18. Besides, adolescents seek to carry out and to engage in activities of their own interest, both inside and outside school, a process that contributes to the formation of their identity [19,24,31], determining factors in the students' own intentions of creative expression [23,28,41,42].…”