Adolescents and emerging adults today spend an estimated seven hours daily attending to media. The media teens attend to commonly present relationships between men and women as a "game" or "competition" in which women seduce through their physical appearance and the masculinity of men is defined through sexual conquest. A growing body of research suggests that viewing this sexualized media may contribute to adolescents' and emerging adults' understanding of and behaviors around romantic and sexual relationships. Using social cognitive theory of gender development, scripting theory, and heterosexual script theory as a framework, Scripting Adolescent Romance presents methods and analyses of data from in-depth interviews with 16 high school and young college students, and focus groups with over 100 individuals in this age group. Findings provide a rarely seen view inside youths' private spaces--their bedrooms and their social media spaces. In often highly-personal conversations, youth provide in-depth information about how they understand and navigate virginity, romantic relationships, sexual situations, and interpersonal violence. Their discussions of "Netflix and chill," Facebook stalking, and the scorecard script illuminate aspects of romance and sex that may be uniquely characteristic of today's young people. This book is a must-read for parents of adolescents, and promises to be an enjoyable, insightful text for classes about media effects, adolescent development, gender roles, and sexual health.

Originally published in 2000, this was the first volume to examine adolescent romantic relationships.

Reading the Adolescent Romance provides an exhaustive study of the developments in young adult literature since the 1980s with a focus on Francine Pascal’s "Sweet Valley High" series, which has become a cultural and literary touchstone for both fans and critics of the novels. Pattee carefully examines the series’ content, structure, and readers, allowing her to investigate an influential marketing and literary phenomenon and to interrogate the intersecting influences of history, audience positioning, and readability that allowed "Sweet Valley" and other teen series to flourish. This book demonstrates that, as a series of generic romance novels, "Sweet Valley High" exhibits tropes associated with both adolescent and adult romance and, as a product of the early 1980s, has and continues to espouse the conservative romantic ideologies associated with the time period. While erstwhile readers of the series recall the novels with pleasure, re-readers of Pascal’s novels — who remember reading the series as young people and have re-visted the books as adults — are more critical. Interestingly, both populations continue to value "Sweet Valley High" as an identity touchstone. Amy Pattee is an associate professor of library and information science at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts. There, she teaches children’s and young adult literature in both the library school and in a dual degree program affiliated with Simmons College’s Center for the Study of Children’s Literature.

Developmental and clinical researchers have only just discovered the phenomenon of adolescent romance as a topic of serious scientific inquiry. This discovery may be related to the overwhelming evidence that adult romantic relationships are failing at alarming rates. Dramatic increases in the rates of divorce, out of wedlock childbirth, and relationship violence lead to questions about the developmental precursors of romantic love and commitment. What's wrong with love and can it be fixed? This book brings together a diverse group of experts from various disciplines to address a serious gap in the understanding of adolescent development. Part I focuses on romantic relations and sexual behavior from the perspective of normative adolescent development. Part II centers on high-risk adolescents and Part III explores the practical implications of current theory and research for clinicians, educators, and health administrators. Together the chapters in this integrative and clinically useful book lay a foundation for understanding how adolescents successfully navigate the tumultuous waters of young love.

Policymakers are interested in promoting healthy marriages in adulthood by providing services to strengthen the adolescent precursors of healthy marriage, especially within low-income populations. But if programs and curricula targeting adolescent romantic relationships are to be effective, they must be grounded in an accurate understanding of how adolescent relationships function and the role that they play in the development of healthy adult marriages. This report evaluates the current landscape of theory, research, and interventions addressing the role of adolescent romantic relationships in the development of healthy adult marriages. Drawing on a thorough review of the existing theoretical and empirical literature in this area, as well as interviews with practitioners directly involved with developing or administering relationship education to adolescents, the authors bring together relevant research and theory from a wide range of disciplines that have examined these issues, and suggest future directions for research and intervention. In particular, they note that although research describing romantic relationships in low-income populations is sparse, there are already-existing nationally representative data sets that include data from substantial numbers of well-sampled low-income adolescents. Analyses of these data would have relatively low cost and a potentially high yield for informing policies that target low-income youth.

Domestic violence in adolescent romantic relationships is an increasingly important and only recently acknowledged social issue. This book provides conceptual frameworks for the design and evaluation of interventions with a focus on developing evidence based practice, as well as a research, practice and policy agenda for consideration.

This collection explores the sexual content of U.S. mass media and its influence in the lives of adolescents. Contributors address the topic of sexuality broadly, including evidence not only about physical sex acts, but also about the role the media play in the development of gender roles, standards of beauty, courtship, and relationship norms. Chapters included here present new perspectives on what teens are paying attention to in the media, and offer insight into how teens are understanding and applying what the media present about sex and sexuality. Employing various methodological approaches, the studies also represent a diversity of adolescent audiences and deal with a wide variety of media content, ranging from teens' favorite TV programs to magazines, movies, music, and teen girls' Web pages. Taken as a whole, this volume highlights the significant roles the media play in adolescents' sexual lives. Sexual Teens, Sexual Media contributes important evidence to the ongoing debate over media effects, making it essential reading for scholars and students in media studies, as well as social and developmental psychology.

In this classic edition top scholars in family research examine the nature and origin of adolescents’ contemporary patterns of sexual and romantic relationships, from the evolutionary roots of these behaviors to policies and programs that represent best practices for addressing these issues in schools and communities. The text offers interdisciplinary expertise from scholars of psychology, social work, sociology, demography, economics, human development and family studies, and public policy. Adolescents and young adults today face very different choices about family formation than did their parents’ generation, given such societal changes as the rise in cohabitation, the increase in divorce rates, and families having fewer children. This book examines these demographic trends and provides a backdrop against which adolescents and emerging adults form and maintain romantic and sexual relationships. This book addresses such questions as: *What are the ways in which early family and peer relationships give rise to romantic relationships in the late adolescent and early adult years? *How do early romantic and sexual relationships influence individuals’ subsequent development and life choices, including family formation? *To what extent are current trends in romantic and sexual relationships in adolescence and emerging adulthood problematic for individuals, families, and communities, and what are the most effective ways to address these issues at the level of practice, program, and policy? Ideal as a supplement in graduate or advanced undergraduate courses on interpersonal (romantic) relationships, adolescent development, human sexuality, couples and/or family and conflict, sociology of children and youth, family therapy taught in human development and family studies, clinical or counseling psychology, social work, sociology, communications, and human sexuality this book also appreciated by researchers and clinicians/counselors who work with families and adolescents.

Donald R. McCreary and Joan C. Chrisler The Development of Gender Studies in Psychology Studies of sex differences are as old as the ?eld of psychology, and they have been conducted in every sub?eld of the discipline. There are probably many reasons for the popularity of these studies, but three reasons seem to be most prominent. First, social psychological studies of person perception show that sex is especially salient in social groups. It is the ?rst thing people notice about others, and it is one of the things we remember best (Fiske, Haslam, & Fiske, 1991; Stangor, Lynch, Duan, & Glass, 1992). For example, people may not remember who uttered a witty remark, but they are likely to remember whether the quip came from a woman or a man. Second, many people hold ?rm beliefs that aspects of physiology suit men and women for particular social roles. Men’s greater upper body strength makes them better candidates for manual labor, and their greater height gives the impression that they would make good leaders (i. e. , people we look up to). Women’s reproductive capacity and the caretaking tasks (e. g. , breastfeeding, baby minding) that accompany it make them seem suitable for other roles that require gentleness and nurturance. Third, the logic that underlies hypothesis testing in the sciences is focused on difference. Researchers design their studies with the hope that they can reject the null hypothesis that experimental groups do not differ.

"Many media users feel as if they are engaging in an interaction or have a personal relationship with people they see in the media. These psychological experiences, that are collectively referred to as parasocial experiences (PSEs). This Handbook offers a thorough synthesis of the fast-growing, international, and multi-disciplinary research of PSEs, celebrating the field's accomplishments to date but also outlining a blueprint for future growth. The book is organized in six sections covering: (1) theoretical, conceptual, and operational definitions of PSEs; (2) theoretical models and state-of-the-art review of research on PSEs across the lifespan; (3) the effects of PSEs on media users' self and their social life (e.g., intergroup relationships, marginalized sexual groups); (3) the effects of PSEs in various contexts such as health, politics, and marketing; and (4) identifying understudied areas of research that call for further investigation (comparative cross-cultural research, marginalized racial/ethnic identities, non-amicable PSRs). In addition to a thorough synthesis of the literature, the handbook identifies several critical theoretical questions that the PSEs research faces today. Across the thematic chapters, the authors debate several overarching critical theoretical issues in PSEs research, such as the boundaries between parasocial and social phenomena and the distinctions between PSEs and other forms of involvement with media. The book also includes a hands-on methodological chapter that provides detailed information about measurement and manipulation of PSEs"--