In a new study appearing in the September issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, David Wooten, a professor at Univ of Michigan, explores the impact of adolescent ridicule on consumer behavior and brand consciousness.
Ridicule, he says, helps teach teenagers what brands and styles of clothes and shoes to wear and which ones to avoid--if they want acceptance from their peers. These pressures also play a major role in thefts and violence by teens who covet expensive symbols of belonging, but who cannot afford to buy them."Although teaching is seldom the motive of teasers, learning is often a byproduct of teasing," Wooten said. "I find that the practice of ridicule both reflects and affects adolescents' perceptions of belongingness, the content of ridicule conveys information about the consumption norms and values of peer groups, and the experience of ridicule influences the acquisition, use and disposition of possessions."
Wooten's study involved interviews with 43 older adolescents and young adults (ages 18-23), who discussed their teasing experiences as teenagers. Younger teens were not included because of the hurtful nature of discussing possibly painful teasing experiences, he said. African American males made up most of the sample.
Ridicule fell into generally three areas: ostracism, in which the teaser flexes individual and group muscle at the expense of lower-status others (bully vs. victim); hazing, in which the teaser assumes a leadership role and teaches target how to gain membership (mentor vs. apprentice); and admonishment, in which the teaser polices group members and detains and embarrasses those who violate norms (police vs. delinquent).
According to Wooten, students who are teased and those who observe teasing learn stereotypes about "avoidance" groups, consumption norms of the "in" groups, the use of possessions to communicate social links and to achieve acceptance goals, and social consequences of nonconformity.
"As a result, many targets and observers of ridicule alter their perceptions, acquisition, use and disposition of objects in order to avoid unwanted attention," he said.
Wooten's findings support a policy of mandatory school uniforms, which may reduce the psychological and social pressures for teens to wear expensive brands and the financial burden on parents who buy them. On the other hand, if uniforms are only optional, they might eventually become stigma symbols, especially if the option to buy them is exercised only by strict parents and low-income families, he says.
Comments
A sample size of 43, consisting mostly of members of a single sub-population, who are asked to recall events that may have occured over a decade before, is no way to conduct a study. He must have a tremendous margin of error if he is really trying to extrapolate to all the schoolchildren in the country. I don't know how he managed to reach a conclusion at all.
Posted by: RyanG | October 13, 2006 8:58 PM
Anecdotally, this sure happened to me. And, interestingly, I was at a school that had "uniforms." By junior high, we didn't have uniforms, and by then, I no longer felt any pressure to wear anything in particular; people in general dressed often like slobs, so I could get away with it.
But during the Uniform years.... In lower school, we were supposed to have green pants and yellow or white polo shirts. The girls could also wear plaid skirts. We were allowed a green cardigan sweater.
My polo shirts were not Izod, and did not have the little alegator on them, becuase my family was quite broke then, and as a result I was ridiculed.
I was also ridiculed for my shoes, which weren't Nikes or Adidas.
(On the flip side, I got in the habit of wearing a green sweater every flippin' day, and even in 7th, 8th, and half of 9th grade, after it was no longer part of the Uniform, I still wore a green cardigan sweater every day. It wasn't always the same one-- I went through quite a number during those years. But I did get known for always wearing a green sweater. I finally gave up the OCD habit in 9th grade.)
-Rob
Posted by: Rob Knop | October 13, 2006 9:26 PM
I teach at an inner city school that has uniforms (gang issue). I will say that I really like them. I think it reduces distractions, especially in the spring when the warm weather normally brings bare skin. I do think that Rob is right that kids will find a way to separate themselves no matter what. It might be the brand of khaki's or the way the girls do their hair.
Example: We've had to crack down on the kids leaving red or blue pens sticking out of their back pockets to identify their gang colors.
Posted by: JYB | October 14, 2006 12:49 AM
The comment about 43-person sample size being too small caught my eye. David Wooten's claim is that people who are teased --emotionally abused by their peer group if they don't conform, while being told how to conform--tend to follow the provided pattern for how to conform. Wooten states he went looking for people from a group most impacted by the phenomenon--African American males--because they would be most likely to shed light on how the phenomenon functions. If you read the paper, he found them, and they did shed light on how the phenomenon functions. So, he wrote a paper.
In his abstract, and in his conclusion, he does not generalize to the world as a whole. This is not a paper about how widespread teasing/bulying is. Plenty of papers in biochemistry, when they are describing a mechanism, use a limited number of cells to illustrate the mechanism of the phenomenon they are talking about... typically -after- the phenomenon is well enough known that people assume it's real. Teasing is real, so a small-sample study on the phenomenon of teasing seems fine to me.
I understand that sample size is important, but there's no reason to make it into a fetish. Sample size is dictated by the goal of the study.
Posted by: Mike | October 14, 2006 7:33 AM
Hmm. Frankly, I don't thing "uniforms" are a reasonable answer. Such things tend to create a sense of conformity, which can screw someone up in a different way, such as making them follow group think like sheep, instead of making their own choices. A better option, which will of course never be implimented, since it would be "too hard"... (Why the frack are parents and schools always scared of "hard", but sane solutions?) would be to impliment guidelines that exclude major disparities of clothing, while still allowing some sense of personal expression. I.e., no obvious clickish clothes or high priced stuff that some can't get, just a set of "acceptable" clothes. They could even do what they did with soft drinks, etc, only healthier and less stupid, and have sponsor companies produce catalogs for them for clothes that the students can pick from. They want to dress in $100 sneakers on the weekends, no problem, but at the school you get to wear one of 4-5 pairs of $20 shoes, with some susidies for those that have financial issues buying them.
Best of both worlds imho. You don't have some idiot robbing a store to buy the Super Nike Delux sports shoes, or what ever, no one is showing up in them at all, but there is still options for what they want to wear and maybe some allowance for general accessories from outside the catalog. And the school gets some extra cash from the sponsorship, without making the kids fat, rotting their teeth, or otherwise massing with their health the way the bloody snack food companies have done.
Posted by: Kagehi | October 14, 2006 3:47 PM
Kagehi, what you suggest sounds a lot like a bad Soviet policy for promoting individuality on the grounds that "individual expression is important to the socialist collective." For example, I can envision the USSR giving people a choice between five different apartments, as opposed to making them live in identical apartments.
All the paper proves is that there's attire-based teasing in American schools without uniforms and with a predominantly low-income student body. In schools with uniforms or with a middle- or high-income student body, teasing will take different forms. The most universal form of teasing isn't classist, but behavioral: there're the exact ways the cool kids behave and the exact things they're interested in, and anybody who veers from these standards is relegated to a lower position in the school hierarchy.
Posted by: Alon Levy | October 14, 2006 6:57 PM