Gendered Peer Friendships and Romantic Relationships Among Youth with Cross-cultural Upbringings: Exploring Social Control

Research and political discourse primarily emphasize social control within minority families, overlooking a broader perspective concerning diverse agents and contexts. This study examines how 15 youths with cross-cultural backgrounds experience and navigate social control in relation to gendered friendships and romantic relationships in Norway. We applied a framework by Honkatukia and Keskinen (2017) that proposes a four-dimensional approach to social control. Our findings reveal an interplay of normative social control from parents, informal control from minority communities and peers from the majority community, as well as formal control from the broader majority society. The participants adopt several strategies in navigating social control, including internalizing, conforming, contesting, and resisting control. These findings provide a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the complex dynamics of ethnic, religious, gendered, age-related, and cultural social control exerted by several agents thereby challenging the predominant culturalist perspective on friendships and romantic relationships among cross-cultural youth.