This paper studies the social representation of residential education for adolescents at risk in a group of 130 students training to become educators. The students performed q-sorts (free grouping of items) utilizing 73 cards. On each card was written a negative behaviour of the adolescents (22 cards), a positive behaviour (21 cards) or an educational act (30 cards). Similarities between items were defined by the number of respondents placing the items together in the same group (simple cooccurence); dissimilarities between respondents were defined by the pairbond measure for distances between categorizations. Scaling the items regarding adolescent behaviour resulted in a configuration which grouped items in life areas such as “aggression”, “respect for house rules” and so on. The educational acts showed a different organisation in terms of interaction style between educators and adolescents - symmetric as between equals or asymmetric and hierarchical - and by interaction intensity, from non conflictual collaboration to stressful relations. The paper presents evidence that these two configurations could underly the sorts of nearly all (90%) respondents, and discusses the relevance of these results with respect to the proposals made by exponents of the structural approach to social representations.
Student's social representations of education in residential care for adolescents at risk
BASTIANONI, Paola;
2006
Abstract
This paper studies the social representation of residential education for adolescents at risk in a group of 130 students training to become educators. The students performed q-sorts (free grouping of items) utilizing 73 cards. On each card was written a negative behaviour of the adolescents (22 cards), a positive behaviour (21 cards) or an educational act (30 cards). Similarities between items were defined by the number of respondents placing the items together in the same group (simple cooccurence); dissimilarities between respondents were defined by the pairbond measure for distances between categorizations. Scaling the items regarding adolescent behaviour resulted in a configuration which grouped items in life areas such as “aggression”, “respect for house rules” and so on. The educational acts showed a different organisation in terms of interaction style between educators and adolescents - symmetric as between equals or asymmetric and hierarchical - and by interaction intensity, from non conflictual collaboration to stressful relations. The paper presents evidence that these two configurations could underly the sorts of nearly all (90%) respondents, and discusses the relevance of these results with respect to the proposals made by exponents of the structural approach to social representations.I documenti in SFERA sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
