Media narratives as a discussion trigger for supporting a healthy attitude towards rejection in adolescence intimate relationships

Abstract

Adolescence is a crucial development stage where both biological and psychological changes take place. Among the various transformations and developments, the discovery of sexuality and intimacy has an important role, especially from sixteen to nineteen years old. The construction of sexual identity is a significant bio-psycho-social development(Kar, 2015), however in Italy almost half of the teenagers have experienced a form of violence from their partners during High School raging from insults to physical aggression (Romito, 2013). The literature agrees that experiencing rejection is a common trigger of aggression with significant repercussions of mental and physical health. Therefore to understand better the phenomenon, its causes and consequences, a combination of desk research and field research was carried out. The results indicated that rejection is lived on an ego level touching the pride of people and therefore it is considered a taboo with strong effects on different levels of society. Based on this analysis, to improve the current situation, it was chosen to focus on the community level by triggering open conversation about rejection. All these insights gained from the analysis were presented to a team of experts and teenagers. Their feedback was helpful to understand the fundamental characteristics that the final design should have to trigger meaningful conversation around the experience of rejection. To discuss how media portraits rejection #FEIC is introduced. #FEIC is a service that provides teenagers with a showcase of media narratives of rejection and interactive activities. The showcase aims to get the teenagers familiar with the idea of media narratives, while the goal of the activities is to make them experiment with them. In the current development, one activity is designed and deepened to use media narratives as a trigger to talk about how society deals with rejection and how that affects teenagers and their thinking. Different variations of the activity were tested to understand what type of interactions were triggering more discussions. Moreover, to evaluate the overall experience and design features, the full service was presented to the experts through in-depth interviews. The feedback gained demonstrated that the use of media is a successful way to trigger meaningful discussion around rejection. The dialogue generated from the #FEIC activity was defined as “different” from what teenagers were used to discussing, “stimulating”, and “useful” to understand better the conditioning behind their judgment.