The Framing of Teenage Health Care: Organizations,Culture, and Control

Adolescent health is one of the most polemical healthissues that has swept the United States in recentyears. This study is about documenting the process ofa project on teenage sex, drug, and alcohol abuse ina small rural California town. It illustrates adynamic set of concerns that impinge on health issues:development and underdevelopment, experts and laypeople, young and old, in a context of thetransformation of a rural economy to a prison-basedindustry. It is also about covert forms of control,pacification, burnout, and teenagers caught in thecrossfire between bureaucratic institutions andcontradictory messages about adolescent health as theycorrespond to changing conditions betweeninstitutional power holders.