AFRICAN-AMERICAN ADOLESCENT WOMEN - PERCEPTIONS OF GENDER, RACE, AND CLASS

This is a reflexive account of a study of the perceptions of young wom en of African-American descent on gender, race, and class. These abstr actions come to life as these young women provide concrete instances o f how these stratifications systems affect their everyday lives. The y oung informants clearly perceive the challenges that these systems rep resent. In reporting the results of this study, the researcher is refl exive on two counts. First, she reflects upon the implications of her European-American heritage for the quality of her interviews and analy sis. Second, she discusses the challenges of writing qualitative resea rch reports. Not only was she inexperienced in how to write reports ba sed on qualitative data, but she also felt constrained by the length r estrictions from telling the whole story.