Diachronicity in Aspirations and Personal Values of Adolescent Girls

Adolescent aspirations are formed within cultural-historic reality. Accounting for diachronicity presents the stability, continuity, change, and transformation in personal aspirations and social expectations in a situated rationality. Additionally, cultural themes in personal values guide adolescents in their life course and self-development. The paper is based on a doctoral research on 15-17-year-old girls from four different rural and urban settings in Delhi and Himachal Pradesh, India. The active interview, focus group discussion, and the personal position repertoire (Hermann in Culture and Psychology, 7, 243-281, 2001) were used for data collection. A charting of aspirations and personal values of adolescent girls was done 5 and 10 years into the future. It was found that with time, roles and relationships became clearer and more concrete. While adolescent girls valued exploration highly in the next 5 years, sociability traits were valued in the 10-year period.