Abstract

MASCLET, Johanne. A study of the social representation of «the Law» aMONG teenagers. Cienc. Psicol. [online]. 2009, vol.3, n.1, pp.29-42. ISSN 1688-4221.

The current social context brings arround the subject of the relationship between teenagers and the Law. At the beginning of the last century, Piaget already sought to understand it through the study of the moral judgment of the child. Since then, work on the subject did not cease evolving. For this study we connected Law and Psychology and we studied the social representation of Law on three different populations: secondary school pupils, high school teachers and lawyers. We put forward the assumption that, depending on their context and social experience, sample’s social representations of Law shall contribute to distinguishing between them as well as between different levels of contents or structure. The sample of this study is composed of 338 subjects distributed as follows: 196 high school students of 3rd year, 78 high school teachers, 64 lawyers. From the methodological point of view, we chose to use the Aixoise School’s theory of central core, adapted for our research. A word association method, containing the phrase “the Law” was used in order to collect our data. Subsequently, the row/frequency method (Rods, 1972; Abric, 2003) imposed itself for the implementation. Finally, using the Jaccard index, we attempted to understand the structure of the social representations

Keywords : Law; teenager; social representation.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )