Foreign Perspectives

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.

Up to now I’ve stuck with one course per year in my time with the Open University which has given that time something of a pottering along feel to it all.

However, I managed to let myself get talked into thinking about overlapping courses over the coming year which means that I now find myself sort-of doing 90 points worth of courses over the next couple of weeks. I say sort-of as I’m not actually doing anything on the human biology course at the moment as I’m working on revising for the child development on the 21st.

Well not quite “nothing” as I’ve been dipping into the forum for the course and picked up the assignments for it last night. Frankly, the level of them is something of a shock. I thought that I’d find this course relatively hard going as I’ve not even done GCSE biology but I’d have been able to do the first couple of questions on the assignment in a matter of an hour or perhaps two. Having said that, the first assignment is mainly health rather than biology based so it avoids the difficult parts of the first book so perhaps later assignments and the exam will be a different matter.

That in turn has me thinking of signing up for the Biological Psychology (SD226) course which starts in February and which would have five months of overlap with the human biology course. It’s got a reputation of being rather difficult though so I’m going to have a look at the course texts before I do anything drastic.

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.

I always like to have a look at what a course will be like before actually signing up for it as those of you who’ve been reading this for a while will know.

Therefore since I’m currently thinking of doing the biological psychology course (SD226) starting next February I’ve been having a look at the course forum for that to see if I can pick up some ideas. It has a reputation of being a seriously difficult course which is something that’s said generally of pretty much all the inter-disciplinary courses that I’ve looked at previously. In fact, that’s why I initially looked at the human biology course that I’m currently signed up for (though it’s a fascinating course in its own right).

Anyway, one thing that I did pick up is that there’s a “hand-holding” book written by one of the course team, called “Biological Psychology” of course which supposedly eases the doing of the course itself somewhat. I just ordered that this evening so hopefully I’ll get a chance to look over it between the end of October and the end of January when the course itself starts.

Interestingly the course is around £350 but the book is £37. Yeah, over 10% of the cost of the course itself! That’s pretty typical for textbooks these days or at least science ones (other subjects get away with prices half that or less). Crazy money, eh?

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.