Privacy and the use of space in adolescence.

Privacy has always been considered by architects and urban designers to be an important criterion in shaping the physical environment. Recently, social scientists have begun to investigate privacy within the social environmental context. The investigation is an attempt to provide both a wider and more integrative conceptual basis for privacy and proxemic research and to determine empirically the links between the construal of privacy and the uses of space during adolescence. Adolescence is generally assumed to be a stage of the life span that is critical for privacy. Research was carried out in the three construal contexts of role, activity and setting. Personal construal styles (both verbal and non-verbal) are strongly emphasized. The empirical work (14 separate studies) was carried out on a sample of 13 and 16 year old adolescents and it sought to establish: (a) the properties of the construal domains of privacy, proxemics, architectural, self, and general environment (role, activity, setting contexts) and the background of Ss, and (b) the patterns of construal across domains and contexts. All the findings are cross-tabulated by the age, sex and social class of the Ss and by the significant situational properties of the construal domain or context analysed. The techniques used include: repertory grids, human and furniture toy model arrangements, room drawing and room sorting, geographical map marking, preference and personality inventories. The results indicate that: 1. Privacy and proxemic construal are multi-dimensional and are strongly related to the individual style of general environmental construal. 2. Privacy is generally a highly salient concept and it is conceptualised along two dimensions: 'setting - non-setting' based and 'limited opening of boundaries - fully-closed boundaries' based. 3. Privacy when construed as a seclusive and physical phenomena becomes a function, in architectural terms, of the number of windows and the height of partitions. 4. The verbal and non-verbal conceptualisations of situations are found to be complementary