311 Paper 2

Naturalism, or the assumption that there are “natural laws” which determine the order of the world regardless of context, is common throughout the textbook “Adolescence” by John Santrock.  One instance of it is in reference to sleep patterns, saying “research suggests that adolescents’ biological clocks undergo a shift as they get older, delaying their period of wakefulness by about one hour.” This clearly ignores contextual differences such as culture or personal preferences. First off, it refers to “adolescents” in general without differentiating between adolescents in different situations. Secondly, it talks about a “biological clock” which overtly implies that this is something inherent in every person, and that in every human this clock changes by about an hour sometime in later adolescence.

An alternative to naturalism is a hermeneutic approach, or looking at each situation through different lenses of context and agency. For example, some adolescents may not have this “shift” due to a stringent schedule, personality traits, choices, or the culture in which they live. An adolescent who has trained his body to go to sleep at the same time and wake at the same time due to farm work or other types of activity (sports, etc.) will not have the problem of this “shift”. In cultures where there is no electricity and therefore no “time” other than the location of the sun in the sky, there cannot possibly be a shift in “biological time”. In addition, perhaps the adolescents who do undergo this delay are in social situations where their evenings are now more full than in childhood, their friends are staying up later, and the demands on their time prompt a choice to get in the habit of staying up later.