Defending peers who have been bullied is often thought to put defenders at risk of becoming victimized themselves. The study investigated the concurrent and prospective associations between defending and (peer- and self-reported) victimization, and examined popularity and classroom norms as potential moderators. Participants included 4085 Finnish…

In this study, we argue that touch is a way of producing gender in preschool and our aim is to explore different kinds of matters that intersect with gendered touch practices in this context. Our theoretical starting points draw on the performativity of gender and the discursively constructed touch practices of early childhood educators. We…

In the field of critical bullying studies, norms and normality have been used to explain bullying in a manner that challenges the mainstream conceptualising of bullying. This study concentrates in a more detailed way on how normality and not-normality are connected to bullying and how the students define not-normality as a reason for bullying. I…

Many sociologists have called for analytical rigor in the study of narrative while maintaining that narrative should be viewed as a form of social action. We argue that the narratological "story-discourse" distinction together with "positioning theory" provides a theoretical basis for such rigor. In narratology,…

This article explores Finnish regulatory authorities' attempts to mitigate young people's participation in mediated sexuality. Previous studies have argued that both attempted regulation and education about media and sexuality are often out of touch with many adolescents' lives. This study uses a Foucauldian inspired critical investigative method…

Aims: We aimed to study a latent social structure behind the variables associated with teenagers' cannabis use at the individual level and, in a social context, formed by school class. Methods: The data used come from the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (ESPAD), conducted in Finland in 2011 (N=3744, response rate 89.6%).…

This qualitative narrative study examined contraceptive use and non-use in light of the Theory of Planned Behaviour. The purpose of this paper was to understand contraceptive use and non-use among Finnish teenage girls: why do girls use or not use contraception in a sexually motivated situation and how do the determinants of the Theory of Planned…

Adolescents tend to overestimate peer drinking; the resulting misperception of the social norm predicts the child's own future drinking. This study examined the misperception's relatedness to a person's drinking pattern in order to facilitate the segmentation of the audience for health education interventions. Adolescent Health and Lifestyle…