Psychology Paper Writing - Essay Example

Psychology For the purpose of this study, I opted to interview and observe a close neighbor of mine, SN, an adolescent girl from Nigeria. This girl is 16 years of age and of West African ethnicity. She is the first daughter in a family of eight children, three of which have died and of the remaining children, all are younger than she. She is the first child to be sent to America in hopes of bettering the family’s prospects. Her parents and siblings remain in Africa as they could only get together enough money, with sponsorship, to send SN. The family in Nigeria is Christian and made special efforts to send their children to the local school as often as possible. SN is recently arrived to America and is living with her sponsor family, an older couple from Nigeria who are attempting to help their former countrymen find a better life. This couple had children in Nigeria, but lost them to disease and starvation before they were able to secure their own passage to America. Having lived in this country for several years, they are now in a position to help others and have determined to do this by offering shelter and support for one child at a time. The ‘family’ lives in a two-bedroom apartment of which SN has one room entirely to herself. SN was provided with education and lessons in English prior to her arrival in America, so she is able to interact with her classmates and keep up with regular classes at the local high school. My interview with SN took place within the apartment she shared with her sponsors. We sat within a very comfortable sofa group in the living room with the television turned off and no other noise happening in the house. Her sponsors were both at work at the time and SN had just returned home from school for the afternoon. Before conducting the interview, I had received agreement from both SN and her sponsors to speak with her about her background and present life and had set up the appointment to be sure everyone knew when it was to take place. SNs sponsors were invited to be present and I was willing to make arrangements to conduct the interview at a time convenient to their schedules if they so desired, but they felt SN would be more open and comfortable if she were permitted to speak without their presence. In making these arrangements, I shared the basic elements of my assignment with them and some of the questions I planned to ask. During the interview, SN sat quietly on the couch, calmly answering my questions and occasionally expressing strong emotion, particularly when she spoke about her family “back home” or how things were different here where she was always alone versus “back home” where she was constantly in the presence of someone else. Whenever she talked about her family, I noticed SN habitually grabbed a pillow and held it to her chest while discussions of other subjects typically did not elicit this reaction. For observation purposes, I also asked permission to attend a lunch session at SN’s high school to see how she interacted with her peers. This was somewhat more difficult because I didn’t want to make SN feel self-conscious about what she was doing and how she was acting, but at the same time I needed to obtain permission for a specific day of the week and arrange for the appropriate time to arrive for her lunch period. Eventually, we determined that I would visit simply as a ‘family friend’ and would sit with SN during her lunch break and be introduced to her friends at some point after the initial interview had taken place. In this way, we hoped, perhaps my observation would feel to SN less like a scientific object and more like a real person. This seemed to have the desired effect as SNs initial nervousness upon my arrival quickly disappeared when her friends seemed to accept me at face value. This was fortunate as it gave me an opportunity to see how SN actually interacted with her friends without seeming to hide in the shadows or marking her out as an obvious object of study. At the same time, however, I realize that the observational objective point of view was somewhat compromised despite my attempts to blend into the woodwork as the friends, and SN herself, had a tendency to try to draw me into the conversation. In order to give SN a chance to share her impressions of the observation or to ask further questions, as well as to give me a chance to share with her my conclusions regarding the study, I also set up a second interview, again in her home and again offering to schedule so that her sponsors might be present at the time. Again, however, they asserted that it would be better for me to interact with SN on my own so that she might have complete freedom of expression. During this second interview, SN and I sat at the dining room table, a glossy polished piece of elegant tabletop with an intricate floral decoration and candlesticks upon it. The intricacy of this setting made it seem as if this table was not often used for dining and SN confirmed my suspicions, indicating that she often ate by herself in her room or on the coffee table in the living room with her sponsors. This only served to heighten my conclusions regarding SN’s life and some of the issues she was struggling to cope with. SN is a beautiful girl of 16. She has very dark skin and shining black curly hair. She is very skinny for her height. She is approximately 5’7” tall, but weighs only about 100 pounds, which is quite a bit underweight according to the most recent BMI tables. According to the Body Mass Index calculator provided by the Centers for Disease Control, SN is within the 1st percentile for teens and is recommended to see a healthcare practitioner (CDC, 2008). Despite her underweight status, SN seems to function well within her environment, not reporting any excessive fatigue in going through her normal activities. However, she does not participate in any physical activity as a regular part of her routine. SN is a sophomore in her high school, attending some remedial classes because the school she attended in Nigeria was not as advanced in its academics as the school in America and because she still experiences some language difficulties that make it more difficult for her to pick up the quick pace of the regular classes. By chronological age, this places her on the cusp between Piaget’s concrete operational stage and the formal operational stage. In the concrete operational stage, individuals exhibit their intelligence through the “logical and systematic manipulation of symbols related to concrete objects” (Huitt & Hummel, 2003). In other words, people in this stage of thinking typically need some sort of concrete symbol to help them consider more abstract thoughts. I saw this in SN in her tendency to reach out to a concrete symbol of her longing for family interaction every time she considered the idea of her family at home and hugged a pillow. Although a surprising number of individuals never progress beyond the concrete operational stage, this is the stage associated with adolescence. According to Huitt & Hummel (2003), there is often a return to egocentric thought early in this stage and this was clear in the case of SN. She was only capable of seeing the world as it related directly to her and had a difficult time understanding that as much as she missed her family, they might miss her as well. Her interpretation of her sponsors’ long business hours were not that they still had to work hard to make ends meet and to take on the added responsibility of an additional individual in the home, but instead that they were busy enjoying their own lives and didn’t really care that much for her welfare. While she was grateful for the opportunity to learn and to seek a new life in America, she was lonely and aware that she was unique in her high school in that she was from a foreign country. She felt everyone was watching her all the time. The formal operational stage also suggests that the individual will become increasingly more able to understand completely abstract thoughts. Although she desperately missed her family, she seemed to understand that her opportunities in Nigeria would have remained much more limited than they were in America. Because of her unique situation, SN had little option but to begin forming her own identity separate from her family, Erikson’s psychosocial stage of identity vs. role confusion, usually associated with adolescence. However, her behavior continued to illustrate that she was still struggling with issues of industry vs. inferiority, a stage usually associated with much younger individuals, ages 6-11 years old. This teeter-totter effect may also be partially explained through SN’s unusual circumstances as she struggled to overcome the recent upheaval of her life. While she had experienced high rankings and tremendous success as one of the most brilliant pupils at her village school in Nigeria, SN had suddenly found herself among the bottom-ranked pupils at a school whose population in one class alone was equal to her whole village. This had easily overwhelmed her previous sense of accomplishment and success and forced her to reassess her previous definitions of competence. While interacting with her friends, who were all slightly immature for their age, SN remained relatively quiet, offering her own comments tentatively and seeking information more often than giving it. When friends expressed interest in her previous life, SN usually downplayed its importance, saying things like, “It was nothing, just a small village” or “my house was just a regular house, you know.” However, there were hints in SN’s behavior that suggested she was simultaneously engaged in forming an identity for herself. Her clothing choices for school wear mimicked that of the glossy fashion magazines even if they weren’t of the correct brand (SN revealed to me that she had made most of her clothes herself in the evenings when she didn’t have homework) and I observed her modeling her school behavior after one of the more popular and glamorous cheerleaders who shared her lunch period with necessary adjustments to her own quieter nature. On a moral level, SN seems to be firmly in Kohlberg’s conventional level stage 3. She is anxiously seeking approval from those around her at all times and exhibits a strong desire to be perceived as a ‘good girl’ by her peers and sponsors. She wishes her parents to hear only good things of her and struggles against her own sense of fairness as she first feels deprived because of her humble circumstances and then feels guilty because of the luxury of her surroundings as compared to that of her siblings. One of the problems she said she was experiencing during the interview was a conflict of stereotypes regarding what was considered a ‘good girl’. At home, a good girl was someone who obeyed her mother and father without question, who helped around the house whenever she wasn’t at school and who was responsible for her young brothers and sisters, which was usually a pleasure more than a chore, particularly because it sometimes meant getting out of lesser liked chores. In the United States, though, she had discovered that good girls are not so well-liked, it was considered strange to want to help around the house and made one unacceptable if they obeyed and respected their elders. This conflict could be seen in her behavior as she worked at night to make her own clothes yet her room remained immaculately clean, yet she joined in conversations with friends in which the chief topic was general disrespect toward elders, typically teachers or parents. In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, SN’s most basic physiological needs were being met in some ways better than they ever had been at home. Although she remains underweight, this is still the result of her home life in which all children went slightly hungry every day. SN’s safety needs were also being met as she had ample productive activity to engage in and was relatively sure of the security of her position. Her family, without the extra mouth to feed, was better able to cope, her sisters and brothers were eating better and her presence in America, and future possibilities, offered hope that this condition would only improve into the future. Thus, her needs begin to break down here in this second most basic level of Maslow’s hierarchy. Because of her sponsor’s busy lifestyle and relatively new status at school as compared to her previous lifestyle, SN had almost no sense of family or belonging at the time of our interview. This was evidenced in her continued references to her family back home, her act of hugging the pillow to her chest and her incredible sense of loneliness. From my interview and observation, it was clear that SN was dealing with several major issues all at once. Some of the most immediately concerning were her low weight and her profound sense of isolation and confusion. Because of her low weight, I was concerned about recommending an exercise program for her, fearing she might be unable to keep up. However, thanks to some earlier experience, I suggested that she get a part-time after school job as a child care assistant. The activity of chasing around after younger children for a few hours after school would help her work up healthier appetites at the same time that it would enable her to interact with younger children closer to the ages of her missed siblings. Adults at the daycare would be available for her when she needed advice she didn’t feel comfortable seeking this information from her sponsors and she would be able to earn some money on her own, strengthening her sense of competence and value. I also suggested to her sponsors that they may wish to try changing their habits somewhat to provide SN with quality time in the evenings when possible by eating dinner together or planning specific events – going to the movies, shopping, playing table games, etc. These suggestions were met with enthusiasm and, on the part of SN, a visible sense of relief. References Centers for Disease Control. (2008). “Body Mass Index Calculator.” Available April 15, 2008 from Huitt, W & Hummel, J. (2003). “Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development.” Educational Psychology Interactive. Valdosta, GA: Valdosta State University. Available April 15, 2008 from Read More