TEENAGE MOTHERS NARRATIVES OF SELF - AN EXAMINATION OF RISKING THE FUTURE

The conventional wisdom that teenage mothering risks the future disreg ards the fact that the young mother's experience and understanding of her past as well as her anticipation of the future are intimately tied to the social world she inhabits. To recover the contextual and tempo ral nature of teenage mothers' lives, this interpretive-phenomenologic al study explored young mothers' self-understandings of identity and t he life course as participants and members of families and communities . Implications of interpretive findings for a narrative conception of identity and the life course are described and applied to community-ba sed, community-focused primary health care.