‘Teenage traumas’ The discursive construction of young people as a ‘problem’ in an Irish radio documentary

Previous research has shown that media representations of young people consistently portray them as in one way or another ‘problematic’, but little such research has focused specifically on the medium of radio. This article contains a detailed case study of a radio documentary series broadcast in Ireland called The Teenage Years. It explores the editorial, rhetorical and narrative devices used to construct and sustain a mainstream clinical-psychological discourse of adolescence, one which effectively ‘pathologizes’ the teenage years. It also ‘homogenizes’ them, privileging age as an explanatory factor in shaping identity and development and thereby systematically ignoring other aspects of social inequality and stratification. It is argued that this is an important ideological dimension of the discourse expressed and enacted by the series