Contemporary research on parent–adolescent decision making has been concerned with decision outcomes and has viewed these outcomes as indicators of adolescent autonomy. We offer an alternative, dialogical perspective, which directs attention to how adolescents and parents co-construct a decision. The analysis is based on parent and daughter narrations of an important school choice—the decision to apply to a new college-preparatory middle school for girls. By highlighting the decision process in three families, we illustrate how co-construction of a decision can differ even among families who would be classified in the same way on the commonly used outcome assessment. We also question the concept of adolescent decision-making “autonomy” in that it has fostered a disregard for the rich dialogical context of all decision making.

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The narrative creation of identity by young adolescents has so far been addressed mainly from an identity-in-interaction perspective, focusing attention on the multiplicity and variability of identity negotiation as adolescents interact with others, typically with peers. In contrast, a sociocultural/dialogical perspective draws attention to the importance of organization as well as variability in identity systems, and thus to the creation of personal identity stories. Our purpose is to illustrate how this perspective serves as a guide in the analysis of girls’ narratives about their decision to attend a new, all girls’ middle school. We emphasize how the stories are constituted by girls’ transactions with the sociocultural context, including societal discourses surrounding single-sex education, and we propose “specialness” as an emergent identity concept that serves to organize the identity narratives.

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Contemporary perspectives on dominance and resistance as multifaceted and dialogical call for a similarly dialogical methodology, as reflected in Saukko's concept of contingent resistances. Compared to much of the past resistance research, contingent resistances sets forth an expanded vision of dialogicality in research design and in the interpretation of actor's meanings. Our purpose is to illustrate three implications of this methodology: (i) polyvocality-a comparison of perspectives of two groups of actors; (ii) consideration of the full range of meanings relevant to the action with particular attention to reactions from the local context; and (iii) interpretations of resistance that are firmly grounded in narrators' meanings. The analysis is based on interviews with parents and their young adolescent daughters about their decision to attend a new all-girl college-preparatory public school located in southwestern USA. Expanding on past studies of girls' school choice, we show how parents and daughters create different meanings of this decision, largely based on interactions with their peers. Although both parents and daughters emphasized academic opportunity as their main reason for the school choice, daughters, unlike parents, were confronted with violating peer femininity/ heteronormativity norms. Thus, the decision required resistance on the part of daughters in a way that it did not for parents. We view contingent resistances as a useful methodological framework in a range of areas where questions of resistance are at stake. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Key words: resistance; dialogical; methodology; school choice During the first wave of resistance research, 30 plus years ago, dominance and resistance were seen as more unitary and more clearly oppositional than they are today, and the prevailing view of resistance was as a logical and reasoned reaction to oppression (Raby, 2005). Contemporary scholars, by contrast, emphasize the multiplicity and complexity of both dominant and resistant discourses, seeing them as intertwined rather than as distinct and