The Image of the Adolescent Girl in Recommended Romantic Fiction for Young Adults, 1979-1989

The purpose of this content analysis was to investigate how realistically novelists portrayed the image of the teenage girl in fiction written for young adults. The researcher analyzed twenty-two books with copyrights from 1979 to 1989, novels identified in Booklist which had one additional review and were. still in print at the time of the study. A checklist adapted from Offer\u27s Self-Image Questionnaire was used in analyzing the psychological self, social self, sexual self, familial self, and coping self. With the use of the checklist the following hypotheses were accepted: 1. The majority of the romantic fiction of the 1980\u27s present a realistic view of the image of the teenage girl. 2. The majority of the romantic fiction present the image of the adolescent girl according to the Offer theory. 3. The majority of the female protagonists are in middle adolescence (15 - 16 years of age)