GIRLS NEED RESEARCHERS WHO:

• Design studies to learn about girls' strengths, resilience, and the conditions that support their well-being, rather than simply focusing on risks and negative behaviors.
• Understand and present girls as multifaceted individuals who live in diverse social contexts, and have a wide range of needs, perspectives, and experiences.
• Promote more nuanced, layered understandings of the ways that gender interacts with race, ethnicity, sexual identity, socioeconomic status, culture, and disability in shaping girls' identities and social experiences.
• Develop and support affordable, confidential gynecological and other health care programs that are accessible to all girls.
• Situate studies of girls' issues in critical analyses of the problematic social practices, inequities, and dominant cultural assumptions that contextualize girls' lives.
• Present data in ways that show the intersections of age, gender, race, social class, and sexuality, rather than offering separate analyses for each category (i.e., youth in general, race comparisons, gender comparisons, etc.).
• Expand research categories to move beyond such practices as characterizing race as only "white," "African-American, and "Hispanic/Latino;" oversimplifying notions of "sexual activity" as only heterosexual intercourse; and using narrow concepts of "achievement" as only quantifiable performance on standardized tests.
• Collaborate with advocates and activists in developing research agendas that focus on girls' concerns, and collect data in ways that tap the perspectives of diverse groups of girls and adults.
• Incorporate girls' narratives into research studies, and involve girls in the design, implementation, analysis, and presentation of research so that they can learn new skills, help shape research agendas, and think critically about their own and others' experiences.
• Resist one-dimensional portrayals of girls as either passive victims or independent heroes, and instead look at the multiple ways that girls both resist and incorporate problematic society messages.
• Expand research on "women's issues" (such as rape, battering, harassment, and pregnancy) to incorporate the experiences of adolescent girls.

This site was last updated on 11/24/2004.

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