Ett skört själv i utveckling - en fenomenologisk undersökning av tonårsflickors upplevelse av självet och självkänsla

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study was to investigate young girls (age 16-17) experiences of themselves and their self-esteem. This was done by semi-structured interviews with eight girls from an upper secondary school in Sweden. The collected material was coded and analysed with Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as a methodological approach. This resulted in four main themes which describe the phenomena: To view yourself from the outside, notions of pressure, compliance and independence, and intimacy and loneliness. The respondents described their experiences by reflecting about how their own person takes place in the different contexts they are in. The pictures that appeared was that the self and self-esteem can be experienced in many different ways and tend to be affected by what is happening outside of oneself. The self was also meaningful to understand in connection to various experiences in relationships. The conclusion was that teenage girls relate their experiences of the self in ways that can be derived from established theoretical constructs such as actual-, ideal- (Rogers, 1959) and false self (Winnicot, 1960) as well as global- (Rosenberg, 1965) and contingent (Kernis, Lakey & heppner, 2008) self-esteem.