Foreign Perspectives

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.

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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?