Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

Young consumers seems a rather short chapter in terms of actual content if you go by the Erika Cox notes. It’s the third of the identity chapters that I plan to go over for the revision and links back to the other two extensively in parts.

The chapter kicks off with what seems basically waffle to the effect that younger children value objects that give comfort and security, older ones value things that can be used in activities and the adolescents valued things associated with identity such as music and jewellery [Kamptner]. Common themes across cultures were control, emotional attachment and utility. The possibility of generational and historical differences makes cross-sectional studies difficult.

Constructing identities through consumption runs through a number of different aspects of identity:

• maintaining status eg through dress and music (Milner)
• using brands as symbols of high-status identities (Anderson)
• solidarity & conflict in consumption and identities eg need to change style constantly to exclude others (Milner)
• societal differences and style identities: gender, ethnicity & class

Theories of identity & young people’s consumption:

• Erikson’s ego identity theory: over identification with groups to avoid losing their identity
• social identity theory (SIT) and self-categorisation theory (SCT): group membership is part of the self-concept (see national identity)
• positioning theory: social constructivist approach (Davies & Harre)

Not too bad a chapter to revise but it seems a bit thin on the ground to me as you’ll have gathered by the length of these notes. Next up is book 3 and early category representation. In theory the chapters of the final book that I’m doing should be easy for me as I covered some of that in the Exploring English course last year.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

National identities in children and young people is quite a well structured chapter with relatively few theorists mentioned so, in principle, an easier one to revise than most.

The chapter starts off with basic definitions of ingroup (ie your own national grouping) and outgroup (everyone else) before moving on to cover some quite basic aspects such as categorisation (eg French people or British people), stereotypes (acquired by age 5), emblems and so on.

Piaget’s open-ended interviews showed the development of national self-categorisation with children from age 5 knowing that they lived in Geneva, that they lived in Switzerland but not that they were Swiss. However, open-ended interviews are tough going when you’re 5 so Barrett used labelled cards instead and found that most children knew they were Swiss by age 6. The factors Barrett found going into the importance of national identity were age (things rated important at 6 were still important at 15, things not so important at 6 tended to be more important at 15), geographic location (more important in national capitals), ethnicity (while London born adolescents rated being British/English more important than those from ethnic minorities and language (generally related to the parents’ politics eg Catalan). This variability challenges Piaget’s ideas.

We then move on to children’s views about members of other national groups. Carrington & Short found that their criteria for labelling someone as a member of a given group included birthplace, English as a first language (British kids) and place of residence; notably ethnicity and race weren’t included. Barrett & Short found that stereotypes began to emerge at age 5. They found that ingroup favouritism existed but that negative feelings were reserved for historic enemies; in general both attitudes were moderated by age. Barrett found that there was no relationship between strength of national identity and attitudes/feelings towards in or out groups. The sources of all these attitudes were the usual culprits ie TV, books, holidays, etc. Notably a lot of this research is quite dated (c1960s) and doesn’t take account of foreign travel nor indeed changes in national boundaries.

The explanations for the development of national identity include cognitive development theory (Piaget). Aboud attributes the reduction of ingroup favouritism from 6 to 12 to underlying domain-general cognitive change (no way will I remember that phrase in an exam!) and in particular: the onset of conservation, multiple classifications, ability to judge deep similarities and the ability to attend to individual differences. This explains the reduction in ingroup favouritism but doesn’t explain differences between countries, attitudes towards historical enemies nor why everyone isn’t the same. Tajfel & Turner’s Social Identity Theory considers membership of social groups as part of our self-concept. Sounds good but the research doesn’t support it.

Overall, a reasonable chapter to revise with the potential for cross-linking to some issues in the gender identity chapter ie ’tis worthwhile doing the two as a pair. It’s on to young consumers next.

Gender identity and the development of gender roles is a very structured chapter which has a number of quite disctinct sections each with their own crop of researchers.

Concepts include gender itself which is generally considered as pertaining to the social characteristics whilst sex is used for biological characteristics although both terms are used pretty much interchangeably by many researchers in the field. Moving on we have gender identity (the persons sense of being male or female), gender role, gender stereotype and gender typed (people conforming to their gender roles). As always, there are wide cultural variations with, as usual, Papua New Guinea turning up many peculiarities such as tribes where everyone is stereotypically female or male.

Research methods are complicated as, for example, Bem’s Sex Role Inventory is mainly for adults whilst toy sorting methods are geared to younger children.

There are loads of different approaches to looking at the field:

• Psychoanalyitical perspectives (Freud: Oedipus Complex, Gilligan: early childhood)

• Social Learning processes (Mischel: conditioning, Maccoby & Jacklin: nothing [but only looked at mothers], Lytton & Rommney and Langlois & Downs: it’s the fathers that do it, Bandura: learned by observation & imitation)

• Cognitive processes

• Social cognitive theory (Bandura: person, behaviour and environment active role, Bussey & Bandura: self-regulation develops with age: younger kids only disapproved of others breaking stereotype)
• Cognitive development theory (Kohlberg: gender labelling, gender stability, gender constancy cf Piaget’s conservation). Overall not very strong evidence.
• Gender schema theory (Martin & Halverston: stereotyping simply used to simplify the information processing). Main difference from Kohlberg is that it happens from the labelling stage

An integration of gender development considers the relative emphasis between social factors and cognition. Whilst both are important there seems to be a reciprocal relationship between social experience and gender conceptions ie more social experience leads to lower gender stereotyping thus girls don’t do it as much as boys due to their generally greater social experience (Banerjee & Linton).

Finally, putting gender in context there are the areas of play interaction & friendship (Benenson: boys have more but shorter play interactions than girls, Lansford & Parker: girls relationships are characterised by more intimacy and self-disclosure) and academic development (Stipek & Gralinski: boys attribute success to ability, failure to luck whilst girls attribute failure to low ability). Teacher feedback in boys concentrates on misbehaviour and lack of motivation whilst in girls concentrates on lack of ability (Dweck et al).

Aside from the sheer number of researchers mentioned, this isn’t a bad chapter to revise and since identity generally comes up it’s probably a worthwhile one to look at. Anyway, ’tis on to national identities next.

Now that it’s less than three weeks to go before the exam ’tis time to start some basic preparations for it.

The seen question is an interesting one in that you can obviously do a lot more preparation for it in advance. One key thing is to try writing out your answer and see how long it takes. You should be aiming for about an hour on the basis that in the exam the nerves will increase your writing speed a little. My guess at the moment is that this means around 700 words for me but I’ve not tried it out yet: all I know for sure is that I can write around 1000 words in Spanish in about two hours.

Incidently, on the writing business, don’t forget that getting on for three hours is a LOT of writing. I’m sure that most people don’t write that much at a stretch these days and the most I’ve written recently is around 2 hours. That being the case, I was thinking of what kind of pen to run with to ease things. Both fountain pens and roller balls are excellent for easing the writers cramp that kicks in with such long exams but they also have the problem that the writing smudges and can go through the page too. Ballpoint is the “choice” of most people but really only because they’ve not thought about it. However, there is the option of gell pens which offer the ease of writing of the fountain/roller pens combined with the convenience of the ballpoints. You’ll be wanting to bring along two pens (three if you’re really paranoid).

Are you going to write on every other line? That’s handy as it lets you add in the odd sentence later if needbe. Leave a page between questions too.

Liquid paper or roll-on paper for corrections? The liquid stuff is a nuisance in exams. Much better to get one of those little paper dispensers. Two actually as they’ve been know to go wonky mid-exam.

Have you printed out the exam allocation page yet? You’re supposed to bring that with you but at minimum do check exactly where it is and, if you can, it’s always handy to do a trial run at the same time of day as you’ll actually be going. I’ve been to the place mine’s at last year and know that a) there’s a LOT of traffic that time of day and b) there’s not many parking spaces.

Don’t forget to bring photo ID with you. They like passports, driving licenses or the student card. Has anyone found a pen that works on the signature strip on the student card?

Munchies, drinkies? I’m a wine gum person in exams and sometimes get through a surprisingly amount of them in the course of planning the answers (or, sometimes, in mid-panic when I can’t find any questions that I like!). A bottle of Lucozade generally gets me through an exam (tried two once and it got me seriously hyper!).

What about your exam bag(s)? If you’re planning on bringing your notes and books with you you’ll need a separate bag for them as you can’t have such things near you in the exam (you can leave them at the back of the exam hall). I generally take a little bag for the pens, Lucozade, wine gums, correction paper, ID, etc.

What question are you going to answer first? It doesn’t matter which order you answer the questions (but make sure you indicate which one you’re answering!). The seen question is the last one on the paper but going by our recent tutorial most people will be answering this first and won’t even look at the other questions ’til it’s out of the way. I’m definitely going to be looking at the other questions first and probably making an initial selection as to which I’ll answer before starting on anything. I’ll decide which order to answer the questions on the day.

Apparently there are marks to be had for essay plans so aside from their usefulness it’s worth doing these in the answer booklet itself rather than scribbling them out on the answer paper. Don’t forget to put a line through them because then the examiner won’t be able to allow any marks for them. Allow 5 to 10 minutes per question for these which, of course, means you’ve only 50 minutes or so to write out the answer itself.

Last, but not least, remember that once you actually sit down in the exam hall you’re way ahead of the game. By this point something like 40% of those that started ED209 have dropped out and getting on for 90% of those who do the exam will pass it. Dropout rates for the L3 courses are more like 20% which implies that they are easier going ie you’re over the hump if you’re shooting for the psychology degree.

First relationships uses up around a third of the chapter in scene setting before moving into quite a structured format.

In most cultures there is a small number (usually one) of people caring for a baby which explains the emphasis on dyadic relationships in this field. The other cultures are touched on in later sections of this chapter but it’s worth noting here that in some cultures a baby doesn’t count as a person at all (I’ll be picking this up on the notes on children’s acquisition of grammar). There’s a brief mention of the tension between Freud’s psychoanalyitical theory and developmental psychology but not really enough to properly understand why this is.

Moving on we get into the more structured part of the chapter with a series of sections dedicated to different aspects of early relationships. First of those is meshing which is an important part of teaching the infant the importance of turn-taking through pseudo conversations both explicitly by way of “baby talk” and indirectly through feeding patterns. The only theorists mentioned in detail in this section are Kaye & Fogel who looked at the development of greetings which ranged from random at 6 weeks through to an equally balanced interaction at 26 weeks.

Next up is immitation which is quite a short section. Both Moran and Pawlby found that mothers were more likely to immitate their baby up to a year old than vice versa. This immitation helps to start the development of a theory of mind ie the idea that others think too.

Scaffolding is basically the junior version of the same notion from Vygotsky. Bruner looked at the reading style used with infants and picked up on the four types of utterance used: “look”, “what’s that?”, “it’s an X” and “that’s right”. Wood et al generalised this to modelling (showing what can be done), cueing (indicating what needs to be done next) and raising the ante (encouraging the child to achieve more complex goals).

Containing is the longest of the sections and in contrast to the earlier sections looks at the negative aspects. First up of these is that Bradley found that young babies generally spend between 25% and 50% of their waking hours in a fretting/crying state which may help to put some of our adult “off-days” into perspective! This in turn means that soothing one’s baby becomes a major task so it’s probably no surprise that Oakley found that 70% of mothers felt angry/violent towards their baby. Klein’s object-relations theory seems important here: it suggests that in the first 2 to 3 months of life babies perceive attributes of objects as being entirely separate objects. Thus, for example, the nipple giving milk isn’t the same object as the same nipple that later doesn’t give milk. Only later does she see the infant constructing the representation of a single object from the multiple objects represented by the various attributes: cf Piaget’s object permanance. With this integration comes depression in that one finds there are no objects that are exclusively good (isn’t psychoanalysis depressing?).

The section on transacting seems to be there merely to point out that the infant is an active participant in constructing their social world. Worth noting is that this chapter is very culture-specific and that, for example, the Kalulis in Papua New Guinea who don’t get into the dyadic conversations that sometimes seem the only way to go in western cultures. Other multi-cultural studies have picked up on this too.

Not a bad chapter to revise. The early sections (meshing and imitation) could be related to the language learning in the third book whilst scaffolding clearly relates back to Vygotsky’s ideas from earlier on in book 1. The psychoanalyitical theory whilst confined to the introduction and the section on containing would probably need to be mentioned in the answers to most potential questions.

That’s my series on book 1 completed so next up is gender identity from book 2. Why not siblings & peers which was on my original list? That’s definitely on my notes from the tutorial but as has been pointed out to me we covered that in TMA3. In that it was highlighted in the tutorial I’ll be covering it but towards the end of this series.