Young People's Understanding of Society (Routledge Revivals)

Adrian Furnham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317246084
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1991, this book represents the first wide-ranging review of young people's understanding of the social world and the functioning of society. Taking a social cognitive view of adolescence, it focuses on the processes by which young people learn to understand other people's thoughts, emotions, intentions and behaviour. Concentrating on the social world of politics, economics, work, gender and religion, the authors cover such issues as: politics and government; work and unemployment; law and legislative matters; religion; marriage and the family; social class; and racial and ethnic differences. This work will be of interest to students of sociology and psychology.

Chapter one

Introduction to the issues

Introduction

All societies socialize their young, although they do it, to some extent, in their own way and with varying degrees of effectiveness. For society, socialization enables accommodation of sorts to be reached between young new members and the ongoing social order. For the individual, it means social development towards adult status and adult involvement in the economy, politics, community affairs, the legal system, the social class structure and so forth. Socialization, taking in family upbringing and school education, is never complete or finished; and for some young people it follows an anti-social, deviant or criminal direction.

Compared to a great deal of research that has been done on young people’s understanding of the functioning of the physical world, there is a comparative dearth of research on how they understand the social world. Researchers from a large number of disciplines including anthropology, economics, psychology, psychiatry and sociology have been more interested in how young people come to understand principles of arithmetic, geometry and physics than those of politics, economics and law.

This book attempts to remedy this imbalance. It concentrates on young people’s understandings of various issues like politics and government (Chapter 2); economics and trade (Chapter 3); the world of work and employment (Chapter 4); the institution of marriage and the family (Chapter 5); religion and other spiritual matters (Chapter 6); the nature of racial and ethnic differences (Chapter 7); legal and legislative issues (Chapter 8); the nature of social class and social stratification (Chapter 9). The general focus is on young people – children and adolescents, roughly from the ages of 5 to 19. But the sharpest focus is on adolescence, the transitional period between childhood and adulthood. Different disciplines have tended to use different terms for describing this transition: biologists often use pubescence; lawyers juvenile; journalists teenage; and psychologists adolescence. Some of these terms have acquired pejorative associations and, although used interchangeably through this book where appropriate, they are all meant to imply young people.

Adolescents get a mixed press, probably as they always have done. They are often portrayed in the mass media as difficult or obnoxious in some way or other, when not as actually criminal. Various empirical studies in America and Britain have shown that the most newsworthy aspects of young people appear to be either as perpetrators of crime or else as victims of injury (Porteous and Colston, 1980). Falchikov (1986) found from an analysis of twenty-one British newspapers that victimization and criminal activity tended to be over-emphasized, whilst sport and unemployment are under-emphasized, and that much reporting is actually misleading. According to the British press in the mid-1980s a typical adolescent is criminally inclined, unemployed, sporting, and the likely victim of various crimes and accidents!

Biologists’ view of adolescence has emphasized it as a period of physical and sexual maturation. Psychoanalysts and neo-psychoanalysts have tended to focus on adolescent anxieties and search for identity, whilst sociologists have focused on the social environment as the determinant of adolescent development. Anthropologists have looked at how cultural patterns shape the experience of young people, whilst psychologists tend to examine the intellectual, emotional, social and moral development of young people.

This book will take a social-cognitive view of adolescence. In doing so, it is concerned with the processes by which young people conceptualize and learn to understand others (their thoughts, emotions, intentions, social behaviour) and the society in which they live. These processes are also related to the behaviour of young people. Some researchers have questioned whether knowledge of the social world and knowledge of the physical world are gained in the same way. Knowledge about the physical world is predominantly factual and objective and is gained through discovery, exploration, first-hand experience, observation, teaching and trial-and-error. But social knowledge is more arbitrary – determined by social, economic and cultural definitions, expectations and requirements. Young people acquire some social knowledge by direct instructions from adults (parents and teachers) and other (often older) children; by observing the behaviour of adults and other young people; and by experiencing approval (and disapproval) for appropriate (and inappropriate) behaviour. ‘Because social rules are less uniform, less specific, and more situation-dependent than physical phenomena, they are less predictable and more complicated to understand’ (Rice, 1984). The young always remain to some extent operators who apply their own notions to get what they want or can out of circumstances; and rules and norms may be subservient to their desires.

The young person’s view of society then is often partial, imperfect and fragmented. The development of social knowledge and understanding may or may not mirror the development in the understanding of the physical world. An intellectually superior young person may be socially inept and social problem-solving skills may be learnt or taught independently from intellectual skills. In each chapter, this book will attempt to offer a critique of the research and theorizing over a wide range of specific topics.

Common themes

Various theories may be detected in the chapters of this book despite the fact that they cover such different areas. Four themes are most consistent:

the stages (steps or phases) that children and adolescents go through in the acquisition of social knowledge (attitudes, beliefs, concepts, ideologies);

the major individual, social and cultural determinants of the change, development and growth of social knowledge;

the coherence, consistency, extent and structure of the social knowledge acquired by young people at various ages in various cultures;

the many ways of imparting social knowledge to young people.

In addition, the chapters reflect a recurring concern about whether society and its institutions are preparing the young adequately for the modern economy, labour market and way of life, and for coping with the rate of change. Within society this concern is frequently directed at school education and often enough linked with both teenage unemployment and allegedly inadequate job performance, and also with teenage involvement in drugs, sex problems, vandalism, violence and crime. The conventional employment or higher education of the young after leaving school is an expectation of society, the family and the young themselves. Consumerism is widely endorsed and actively promoted among the young by business interests, but it attracts far less concern than that directed at unemployment and other teenage problems (which are often not seen as problems among adults). Lack of money-management and consumer skills are not equated with lack of employment or employment skills and lack of capacity to deal with common youth problems.

Stage-wise theories in growth

What characterizes a great deal of developmental psychology is the idea that the development of a process or the ‘unfolding’ of a skill can be described in terms of a specific number of identifiable stages. In science description, taxonomy usually precedes description, explanation and so it is in developmental psychology.

A recurring pattern of theorizing and research often appears. Firstly, through observations and experiments researchers posit a series of developmental stages children and adolescents go through in acquiring a full understanding of a concept or the mastery of a skill. Secondly, it soon becomes noticeable from the work of different researchers that there are competing stage-wise explorations such that one researcher may have four stages and another six or even eight. Although there is broad agreement as to the age at which noticeable change occurs, there remains debate as to the precise nature of the stages. Unless the stage-wise development is theory driven and the stages linked to more general developmental trends, a pluralistic view may preside so that there is no agreement about the number, length, etc., of the stages.

Even if there is broad agreement as to the number of identifiable, psychologically coherent and meaningful stages in the development of a concept, stage-wise theories have a number of specific problems. Firstly, the theories are descriptive rather than explanatory, for what is considered is how, rather than when, a young person moves from one stage to another; that is, what precipitates the jump from one stage to another. Secondly, there is the problem of the ‘clearness’ of the jump and how long is the period between the full relinquishing of the beliefs and behaviours at one stage for the beliefs and behaviours of the next. Thirdly, there is the problem of whether the order of the stages is invariant and whether all stages must be passed through or some are skipped by individuals. Most stage-wise theories implicitly rather than explicitly assume that all individuals pass through the various stages linearly from beginning to end, not considering whether all individuals necessarily reach the final stage or indeed if they may sometimes regress to a previous stage rather than move to the next.

Piaget’s famous stage-wise theory has not been without its critics. They have been critical of his ‘clinical’ methods of research; stages proposed that are not rigidly coupled with chronological age; the change proposed from one stage to another being neither sudden nor all embracing; and the consistency of the stages being a function of the regularity of a culture’s child-rearing patterns rather than some in-built and inevitable sequence of development.

The following chapters contain many stage-wise formulations, most highly specific to a single concept or idea. Sometimes researchers look at a whole area and develop stage-wise conceptions. Consider, for instance, the detailed and specific stage-wise formulation by Furth (1980) of how children come to understand the economic world.

Stage I: personalistic elaborations and absence of interpretative system

General criteria: Children fail to recognize the basic functions of money and confuse personal and societal roles, neither of which they understand. In contact with societal events they either do not see a need for explanation of what they observe or, when they do, they associate personal experiences in playful elaborations, largely unconstrained by logical or functional exigencies. The dominant context in which they think about social events, personal or societal, is their own psychological reactions.

Specific criterion: Money is freely available. Money transactions are a simple exchange of money or an empty ritual without precise meaning. Change received after payment for goods is considered a primary source for obtaining money.

Stage II: understanding of first-order societal functions

General criteria: Children understand the basic function of money as a special instrument of exchange in transactions they observe, but not much more beyond that. In familiar instances they distinguish realistically the acquisition of a societal from a personal role. Their images beyond the experienced social events, lacking an interpretative system, are playful and person-centred. The images engender in children’s minds a static social order, thereby avoiding possible cognitive conflict.

Specific criterion: Money is paid in exchange for goods bought. Change is understood, but not what happens with the money paid to the shopkeeper. The shopkeeper’s payment for goods received is either ignored, denied or, when affirmed, not clearly related to the customer’s payment.

Stage III: part-systems in conflict

General criteria: Children construct functional part-systems, through which they interpret societal events beyond first-order observations. These differ from the playful images of Stage II in being ‘functional’, i.e. adapted to the actual societal system. However, the systems are incomplete, hence ‘part-systems’, and thereby lead invariably to cognitive conflict of which the children may be more or less aware. This is another contrast with Stage II thinking where conflict is very largely absent. They understand qualitatively – not quantitatively – the mechanism of buying and selling and of a paid job. They do not adequately take into account differences in scale between personal and societal events, such as differences in time scale, in monetary expenditure, in the network of conditions surrounding the particular event. One manifestation of cognitive imb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Preface
• 1 Introduction to the issues
• 2 Politics and government
• 3 Economics and trade
• 4 Work and employment
• 5 Sex and gender
• 6 Religion and spiritual matters
• 7 Race, colour and prejudice
• 8 Law and justice
• 9 Social class and stratification
• 10 Conclusion
• References
• Name index
• Subject index