Session Information
23 SES 01 B, Approaching Education Policy (Part 1)
Paper Session
Contribution
Educational questions and changes have rarely been addressed from social-psychological points of view. In this study we approached these issues by examining the attitudes that different groups of parents hold towards topical school issues. Theoretically speaking, we based our examination of parents’ educational attitudes on the assumption that they are guided by social representations, which can be defined as ways of social groups to understand and explain something regarded as important (Moscovici, 2000): a shared social position is seen to generate similar experiences and corresponding attitudes to social reality, thus producing a similar relationship to that reality (Doise et al., 1994). A parent’s social status and gender locate her/him in the educational hierarchy and thus ‘measure’ his/her social-psychological distance from the school (Räty & Snellman, 1998). Public discussion can be seen as a process in which social representations are made explicit and elaborated in the context of a symbolic relationship; thus attitude statements can be viewed as communications among social groups representing different viewpoints. Analyses of public discussion provide important material for objectifying the evaluative contents of social representations. Empirically speaking, we wanted to compare our findings with those we had noted in the early 1990s (Räty et al., 1996).
Two major research problems were put forward. First, how is current Finnish educational discussion structured: do different notions of intelligence still affect this discussion, and in what ways are novel issues integrated with or disintegrated from the established themes? Second, how do the different groups’ social positions (gender and status) organise their representations of education.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Doise W., Clemence, A., & Lorenzi-Cioldi, F. (1994). The quantitative analysis of social representations. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Moscovici, S. (2000). Social representations. Explorations in social psychology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Räty, H., & Snellman, L. (1998). Social representations of educability. Social Psychology of Education, 1, 359-373. Räty, H., Snellman, L., Mäntysaari-Hetekorpi, H., & Vornanen, A. (1996). Parents' views on the comprehensive school and its development. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 40, 203-215.
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