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The purpose of this paper is to examine how adolescents' self‐concept and brand image congruency are related to their level of liking for an apparel brand. It also aims to examine whether this relationship varies depending on adolescents' gender and identity development.

Self‐image congruency theory was used to investigate whether adolescents' liking for an apparel brand was related to perceived congruency between aspects of self‐concept and apparel brand. Male and female adolescents (n=140) between 14 and 18 years of age participated.

Adolescent consumers liked apparel brands that they linked to their ideal social self‐concept. This connection was particularly strong for male adolescents with less established identities.

Adolescents liked an apparel brand when they reported a link between the brand and ideal social self‐concept. These adolescents may have used apparel brands to shape the views others formed of them.

Many questions concerning the basis for adolescents' apparel brand preferences have not been answered. Our research documents how male and female adolescents use branded apparel products in relation to their identity development status.

The purpose of this paper is to explore different kinds of authenticity in four health courses for adolescents. In school-based approaches to health education it is often difficult to present health in ways that make sense and appeal to adolescents. Authenticity, as a health-pedagogical concept which focuses on the quality or condition of being believable, trustworthy or genuine, has the potential of providing an analytical framework as well as practical recommendations for this challenge.

This was a qualitative study based on 23 group interviews with a total of 114 adolescents and 12 individual interviews with their teachers. The data were iteratively analyzed and categorized using guidelines for content analysis. The study used a theoretical construct focusing on participation, knowledge and health identity, as each of these three elements affects aspects of authenticity when applied to a health education context.

The analysis revealed four interdependent categories of authenticity: first, authentic connections/relations; second, authentic instructors; third, authentic themes; and fourth, authentic methods/activities. In each of the four categories the paper presents analytical tools for researchers and practical recommendations for health education professionals.

The paper presents a new and innovative model with four categories of authenticity that provide health practitioners with important knowledge about why and how health education might wish to focus on authenticity in order to provide conditions that create a significant health educating effect for all adolescents, not just for the ones who are already healthy.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight how one high school psychology teacher helped students explore the concept of identity exploration and express their own personal identity through the use of contemporary art in a high school psychology course.

In this paper, techniques one high school teacher used for utilizing the visual arts to teach identity exploration in a high school psychology course are shared, including student discussion surrounding the visual analysis of contemporary artwork, thoughtful student application of developmental theories and the student production of original artwork to express one’s identity.

Students participating in the lesson engaged enthusiastically in the discussion of the use of selfies in contemporary art and demonstrated thoughtful reflection in the creation of their own selfies.

Future research is needed to systematically investigate the effectiveness of incorporating contemporary art as a means of teaching identity exploration to adolescents as part of a high school psychology curriculum.

Adolescent exploration is a key feature of the adolescent experience and is part of the psychology curriculum at the high school level. Such courses afford students the unique opportunity to apply developmental theories and theories of identity exploration to recent occurrences in their lives. One possibility for teaching identity exploration is through the visual arts.

This lesson advances psychology instruction through the purposeful scaffolding of identity exploration as both content and process using contemporary art.

The study seeks to further explore the hypothesised link between the increase in mobile phone ownership and use and the reported decline in adolescent smoking. Evidence for the link was gathered by examining perceptions of mobile phone use in the context of social identity and adolescent smoking.

The study developed and employed a questionnaire‐based survey design asking a sample of student participants to characterise mobile phone users using a semantic differential scale. Data were also collected in relation to individual levels and patterns of mobile phone usage. The sample consisted of 172 undergraduate students studying in the Faculty of Health based in a UK university.

Findings show first that mobile phone use is associated with a number of positive, desirable personal and social attributes relating to concepts of social identity and image formation, and that many of the attributes associated with mobile phone use are those commonly associated with smoking behaviour.

The association between mobile phone use and social identity theory provides a theoretical framework which helps explain the prolific rise in mobile phone use and can be used to support the viability of a link between a decline in levels of adolescent smoking and a rise in mobile phone ownership. Further evidence needs to be gathered which examines both behaviours in a single cohort of adolescents to establish the direct impact of mobile phone use on smoking behaviour in this particular group.

Mobile phone use may serve as a displacement behaviour for smoking in adolescents and may provide an example of a positive – as opposed to a negative – addiction, given that it is a potential alternative to smoking in adolescents.

The paper provides an examination of the health implications of a modern‐day social phenomenon. It draws on and draws together established theory and empirical work to further advance a previously proposed link between smoking and mobile phone use. Establishing such a link has important implications for health education and promotion activities.

This paper aims to examine how gender differs in environmental attitude, environmental concern, perceived seriousness of environmental problems, perceived environmental responsibility, peer influence, self identity in environmental protection and green purchasing behavior in Hong Kong adolescent consumers.

A total of 6,010 (2,975 males and 3,035 females) adolescents in Hong Kong were recruited through multi‐staged random sampling. Surveys were distributed through 48 high schools in Hong Kong.

Female adolescents scored significantly higher in environmental attitude, environmental concern, perceived seriousness of environmental problems, perceived environmental responsibility, peer influence and green purchasing behavior than male adolescents in Hong Kong. In contrast, male adolescents' average score on self‐identity in environmental protection was significantly higher than that of the female adolescents.

A major limitation lies in the self‐reported nature of survey used in the study. Future study should include some objective assessments (such as observations or other‐reported survey) of the subjects' green purchasing and environmental behaviors.

This study should provide a useful source of information for international green marketers in Hong Kong. Hong Kong female adolescents constitute a potentially good market for green products. Marketing messages targeting this group should use emotional appeals, emphasize individual responsibility to protect the environment, and facilitate peer networking to spread good word‐of‐mouth.

This paper offers practical guidelines to international green marketers who are planning to target the Asian markets.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence that marketing has on teenagers and their development of identity and question the ethical implications of this influence. It aims to explore the extrinsic identity and the intrinsic identity using Erikson's model of identity versus role confusion; to identify passive and active personality types within adolescents; and to establish the importance of local community compared with web‐based communities.

The views of developmental theorists are discussed and correlations between teenagers characterised as active; those who would be identified as being “cool”, and passive characters; those lacking “cool” are drawn. This is then applied to the theories of the self and the empty self, a concept arguably used by marketers who wish to encourage notions of the empty self through negative references to being uncool, with the aim of stimulating a demand for the cool sustenance that they supply. Data were gathered from a questionnaire survey comprising 79 secondary school teenage pupils.

The findings, though limited to only one locality, show that the majority of the sample was identified as being passive, implying that the majority of these teenagers were aspirational in their quest for cool. In addition, more of the participants felt a part of web‐based communities such as Bebo than of their local community. The study suggests that marketers, ethically or otherwise, are able to target the passive majority by encouraging feelings of being un‐cool encouraging the empty self to then profit from the sales of a cool fulfilling product.

The localisation and survey sample size impose limitations on the generalisation of the findings for a national or even a regional location. Also, the primary research provides only a snap shot of the tastes and personality traits of individuals taking part in the survey at that point in time that are susceptible to change as is the definition of cool. However, the evaluation of the findings offer some interesting and valuable indications of support and contradictions to the theories discussed.

Through an understanding of the strength of the influence marketing has on a teenage demographic and the importance that the teenagers surveyed attached to social network sites, some indication is given of the quest for identity of the youths of today in a UK locality. This study therefore provides a small but valuable stepping stone for a much larger investigation of this concept on a regional or national scale.

A residential care is home for children who live there and is simultaneously a workplace for employees aiming to safeguard the needs and development of children. Studies have shown that adolescents’ descriptions of life in residential care are connected to feelings of otherness and deviance. The purpose of this study is to explore how adolescents in residential care in Norway relate residential care as a home to their experiences of everyday life in this context and to their relationships with the employees.

This study draws on individual, qualitative interviews with 19 boys and girls (aged 15–18 years) living in residential care homes in Norway. The interviews explored their narratives of everyday life in residential care. The adolescents were encouraged to tell about yesterday and were asked follow-up questions regarding everything that had occurred during encounters with employees. The Norwegian Center for Research Data approved the study.

The analysis shows tensions in the adolescents’ accounts between the institution as an abnormal context and their own subject position as normal. By drawing upon the terms “stigma” and “recognition” in the analysis, the study shows how recognising relationships between the youth and staff decreases the potential to experience stigma.

This study contributes to existing knowledge on social work in residential care. The paper shows how the institutional framework and employees’ practices impact adolescents’ self-understanding and their experiences of residential care as a home.

The purpose of this study was to examine how the identity of undergraduates who use social networking sites in selected Nigerian universities influences the prediction of their sexual behaviour.

A questionnaire survey was used to collect data from 388 students from three public universities in Nigeria.

Sex and age exerted sufficient influence on the youth’s sexual behaviour, but the identity variables seemed only to increase the tendency of younger males to form intimate relationship with partners. Specifically, young males who maintain high level of social relationships have a high tendency of developing intimate relationship with partners.

This study that deployed identity variables provides wide-ranging information on how identity moderates sexual behaviour in the presence of traditional predictors of demographic characteristics and social networking.

This study demonstrates that identity has a very strong influence of the predictive power of sex and age on sexual behaviour.

This study is the first that examined sexual behaviour, identity and social networking together.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model regarding adolescent adjustment issues overseas.

Using previous literature on expatriate adjustment and in‐depth interviews with students currently living abroad, a model of expatriate teens' adjustment is developed.

Interviews found that although some issues of adolescent adjustment are similar to expatriate and spouse issues, several were unique. In addition, the interviews suggested that the effective adjustment of the adolescent might lead the expatriate to stay abroad longer than originally planned.

Small sample size and limited generalizability form the main limitations of the exercise.

Effective predeparture training for all family members is imperative for expatriate success.

The papers represent the first comprehensive look at the issues that affect the adjustment of expatriate teens.

The purpose of this study is to explore the association between eating patterns, social identity and the well-being of adolescents via a mixed methods study of Chinese teenagers. The specific research questions presented in this study are as follows: What is the relationship between social eating and well-being? How is the relationship between social eating and well-being mediated by social identity?

This study is based on a sequential mixed methods study, including interviews with 16 teenage–parent dyads, and a large-scale survey of over 1,000 teenagers on their eating patterns, conducted with the support of public schools. A model that tests relationships among social eating, social identity and subjective well-being is developed and tested.

The results show that dining with family members leads to improved subjective well-being for teenagers, through a partial mediator of stronger family identity. However, dining with peers is not found to influence subjective well-being.

The privileged position of family meals demonstrated through this study may be an artifact of the location of this study in one Chinese city. Further research is needed related to the connections among social identity, objective well-being and the social patterns of teenagers’ food consumption behavior.

To improve the subjective well-being of teenagers, families, public policy-makers and food marketers should support food consumption patterns that promote family meals.

While many food-related consumer studies focus on the individual, social and environmental influences of food choices of adolescents, few studies address how eating patterns affect overall well-being. These results reinforce the importance of understanding the effect of the social context of teenagers’ eating patterns on health and well-being.