On the Case of Youth: Case Files, Case Studies, and the Social Construction of Adolescence

Abstract

Case files and case studies occupy a significant place in histories of mental illness, sexuality, and "delinquency," and historians have considered the ways case files and case studies construct subjective categories and social problems. This paper foregrounds questions of age, and I ask how young people have been conceptualized within New Zealand case files and case studies between 1900 and 1960.1 suggest that, within the case record, the texts of adolescent subjectivity reveal wider concerns around work, discipline, respectability, and social order, along with changes in social science research and writing. At the same time, I argue that case files and case studies have played an active role in the social construction of adolescence in New Zealand's past.