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The relation between sociopolitical cognition and attitude consistency and stability among young people in Sweden: What does the schema concept add?
Author(s) -
ZAKRISSON INGRID
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9450.1994.tb00942.x
Subject(s) - operationalization , sophistication , schema (genetic algorithms) , psychology , cognition , consistency (knowledge bases) , social psychology , metropolitan area , developmental psychology , sociology , epistemology , social science , mathematics , pathology , machine learning , medicine , philosophy , geometry , neuroscience , computer science
Earlier research has suggested cognitive processes to be important in the formation of social attitudes among young people. A question thus raised concerns the nature of these processes. Certain features of sociopolitical sophistication (schema‐wise information processing) can be isolated which have an impact on the way sociopolitical attitudes are expressed. The main purpose of this study was to operationalize these features in sociopolitical sophistication, and study their relations to attitude consistency and stability among young people. The sample consisted of 542 children and adolescents from metropolitan Stockholm. Results from factor analyses revealed (a) two factors in sociopolitical cognition, differentiation and integration, and (b) two factors in sociopolitical attitudes, consistency and stability. Correlation analyses displayed only a few relations, i.e. attitude consistency within the most narrow domains (self‐defined categories) seemed to decrease with increasing integration. In light of these results it is concluded that these young subjects certainly have cognitive structures for sociopolitical issues, although these structures are not necessarily hierarchically organized.