How did you become the way you are today? You might expect teenagers to be reluctant to talk about themselves and yet 268 of them did not hesitate to reply to the above question when it was put to them by Aurore Boulard, a clinical psychologist and lecturer at the University of Liege. Their comments were then analyzed by means of an IT tool in order to highlight the most commonly used topics and words with the objective of comparing these results to those recorded among depressed and obese young people. The differences recorded should lead to better therapeutic care. 

At least thirteen thousand four hundred minutes. This is the equivalent of nine and a half days without interruption. Aurore Boulard certainly didn’t calculate this but she did spend a great deal of time listening to teenagers talking about themselves. She listened to precisely two hundred and sixty-eight teenagers who each spoke to her for a period of fifty minutes while answering the following question: How did you become the way you are today?

This was an opportunity for this clinical psychologist to record the life-stories of students aged between 12 and 18. Aurore Boulard, who is a clinical psychologist and also a lecturer at the University of Liege, had already conducted the same survey among 3 to 13 year olds and this resulted in the empirical observation that narrative skills are acquired at around 12 years of age. Only pre-adolescents of this age group are capable of talking about themselves and constructing their life stories. This is an important skill at an age when an individual begins to construct his or her identity with regard to the outside world.  

While many researchers have shown an interest in constructing the life-stories of teenagers, they have all put forward theoretical concepts based on adult testimonies. Aurore Boulard has preferred to allow teenagers to speak for themselves. This study is all the more original as it is based on a softwares of textual data analyses. This is a technology which makes it possible to note and record the most frequently used words, the tenses and the repetition of pronouns and verbs etc.

This is a tool that is frequently used by linguists and marketing specialists which Jean-Marie Gauthier, Professor of child and adolescent psychology at ULg, had the idea of applying to psychology. “This is relatively new”, he explains. “Only one other school, in the US works in the same way. The objective is to link research and fieldwork. When working in clinical conditions, we focus on the words used by the young people who are seated opposite us and we try to use this to help them. It is a fact that the subjective nature of individual practice is often criticized. Our ambition is to verify the theories based on a large number of cases to help make our therapeutic objectives more precise”.

Effectiveness and neutrality

The use of a software program makes it possible to analyze an important number of interviews which is an impossible task when one is armed with only a pen and paper. Imagine the amount of time that you would need to manually record the word “I” each time it is used during the 13,400 minutes of recording and then repeat the operation for dozens of other pronouns and verbs…The textual analysis tool also has the advantage of being neutral, where a researcher might be tempted to try to find the words he wants to hear in the text.