The role of leadership in negotiating adolescent identity: Voices of female secondary school students in alternative education.

This narrative study presents a collection of personal experience stories from five young women enrolled in grades 11 and 12 of an alternative education program. The purpose of this study is twofold exploring how the participants perceive and experience leadership in their lives and how their experiences with leadership affect the participants' development of a stable sense of identity and an empowered sense of self. The collected data is presented first as whole narratives and then through themes that emerged from a content analysis. The analysis revealed helpfulness as the defining characteristic of leadership and that the participants believe they are leaders, at least some of the time. The participants demonstrated having reached a stable sense of identity but expressed a lack of confidence as a barrier to becoming fully empowered persons. Using these findings, the researcher outlines ideas for the development, recruitment, and implementation of youth leadership development programming. --P.ii.