Adolescents talking about personal responsibility

Abstract

The role of personal responsibility in the lives of adolescents remains a largely overlooked area in the psychological and educational fields. The present study utilised focus groups with 20 white, middle-class adolescents to examine how they understand and integrate the notion of personal responsibility into their lives. Key themes including awareness of thoughts and feelings, behavioural choices and control, and consideration of consequences were identified as important components of the personal responsibility variable. Interesting gender differences were found with females and males identifying different emotions as those within and outside their control and females only identifying concern for the feelings of others as a major factor in decision making. The key themes served to generate parameters around which to enclose the personal responsibility variable.