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Social representations and group membership: shared and diffused parental ideas in three Israeli settings
Author(s) -
ORR EMDA,
ASSOR AVI,
CAIRNS DAVID
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
european journal of social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.609
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1099-0992
pISSN - 0046-2772
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1099-0992(199609)26:5<703::aid-ejsp782>3.0.co;2-x
Subject(s) - psychology , social psychology , mainstream , developmental psychology , set (abstract data type) , social group , style (visual arts) , philosophy , theology , archaeology , computer science , history , programming language
The study investigates how the characteristics of subgroups within a culture are related to the structure of parental ideas held by their members. Two subsets of social representations were suggested—shared parental ideas (SPI) which are largely common to members of a group and serve the goals of individuals as group members as well as the goals of the group itself, and—diffused parental ideas (DPI) which are dispersed within social groups, and are instrumental in achieving individual goals. The respondents were kibbutz and two subgroups of urban parents with high and low levels of education ( N =299) which differed in the extent of exposure to mainstream compared to group‐specific parental ideas, the desirability of the group as indicated by its social status and the permeability of group boundaries. The findings were specific to the research task: only small differences in SPI and DPI were found among groups in a sorting task of child‐rearing items; but major differences were found in their responses to a similar set of items organized as a Likert‐style questionnaire. Only DPI and no SPI were found in the questionnaires of urban parents with low levels of education. In contrast, two similar clusters of SPI were identified in the kibbutz and among urban parents with high education. Another set of ideas was recognized as DPI in the kibbutz. The findings suggest that the Israeli urban parents with a low education did not share the parental ideas with each other, or with urban‐high and kibbutz parents, whereas similar parental ideas prevailed in the kibbutz and among middle‐class urban parents. Hypotheses were formulated regarding the group characteristics that foster the construction of SPI versus DPI by group members.