girls and shame: A qualitative phenomenological study

Shame is a social emotion that has not been clearly defined in sociological studies. The purpose of this article is interpreting the views of female students about the concept of shame. This study was performed by hermeneutic phenomenology. For this purpose, unstructured interviews were conducted with 13 female students in the age range of 20 to 26 years old from middle-class families in Tehran, during which the respondents expressed their experiences of this feeling in their lives. The data obtained from these interviews were analyzed using Van Mannen's phenomenological method. As a result, four themes were extracted from the findings that can depict the experiences of female students from the phenomenon of shame. These include "shame on losing one's reputation", "shame on failing to achieve the ideal", "shame on oneself" and "social shame". Common features in different types of shame are “negative self-evaluation ” and “relationship between shame and identity”. Also, types of shame are different according to the type deviation and their function. The intensity and weakness of different types of shame has also been different in the situations related to each of them.