26:T42a,

Previous research has shown that media representations of young people consistently portray them as in one way or another ‘problematic’, but little such research has focused specifically on the medium of radio. This article contains a detailed case study of a radio documentary series broadcast in Ireland called The Teenage Years. It explores the editorial, rhetorical and narrative devices used to construct and sustain a mainstream clinical-psychological discourse of adolescence, one which effectively ‘pathologizes’ the teenage years. It also ‘homogenizes’ them, privileging age as an explanatory factor in shaping identity and development and thereby systematically ignoring other aspects of social inequality and stratification. It is argued that this is an important ideological dimension of the discourse expressed and enacted by the series.

27:T471,

Media play an important role in children’s and young people’s construction of identity and construction of experience in Western cultures. Masculine identity can be constructed by the ways boys use, relate and talk about media; but construction of identity is not only gendered, it is also ‘age-related’.

This article seeks to figure out how particularly television constitutes a framework for interpretation, where boys may demonstrate individual growth by marking themselves as young boys in opposition to their earlier life as younger boys.It describes some of the binary oppositions that constitute boys’ concepts of growing older compared with being younger, and shows that the concept of development is powerful compared to newer thinking of childhood as a valued period in its own right. The analysis is based on interviews of boys aged 15 to 17, who have grown up in three different areas of Norway.

28:T6da,