Investigating girls' understanding of girlhood and explaining it in the policy and social planning system with emphasis on paragraphs

Girl-hood is an identity tied with gender that, regardless of its singularities, is understood inconsistently in different social analytic systems. The current research aims at clarifying the relationship between the girls’ identity and perception of their girl-hood with their descriptions of it in the first place –free from prescriptions and pathologies. For the purpose, we adopted the qualitative method with a phenomenological strategy. To present the best aspect of the research, participants for the sample are chosen consciously so that they are of an age that is the threshold of a new identity, enabling them to explain girl-hood in a comprehensive manner. Therefore, we interviewed 20 girls born between 2001-2006. We gathered the complementary data of the interviews in form of focus groups. Among others, we went to the girls’ confrontation with those topics that better reflect girl-hood. The descriptive phenomenology of the girls’ descriptions of their girl-hood demonstrates that these girls and their perceptions of girl-hood are by no means merely an effect of the structure or institutional shortcomings; rather, due to their presence in fluid, identity-making contexts, they reflectively reconstruct their personal and by extension, their interpersonal and social identities. If we consider identity as one’s “stable” understanding and image of oneself, then in the lifeworld of these girls, the very topic of “identity” faces fundamental challenges.