CONSENSUAL REPRESENTATIONS OF SOCIAL-STRUCTURE IN DIFFERENT AGE-GROUPS

The present study is an exploratory investigation into the development of consensual social representations of Australian society. Thirteen to 14‐year‐old and 16 to 17‐year‐old students from two different schools rated the degree of similarity between 12 social groups in a multidimensional scaling exercise. An adult university sample also completed a similar procedure. The younger samples tended to cluster similar groups together, whereas one 16 to 17‐year‐old sample and the adult sample generated a linear or dimensional structure of the groups. While all samples contained a fair degree of individual variation in their representations of the groups, this variation decreased with increased age, suggesting increased consensual representations of society with increased social development. 1991 The British Psychological Society