Justice judgements, school failure, and adolescent deviant behaviour.

BACKGROUND: The current paper is based on two different approaches. One is the relational model of authority (Tyler & Lind, 1992), which addresses the effects of justice perceptions on the legitimacy of authorities and behavioural compliance. The other is Emler and Reicher's theory (1995, 2005), which explains the involvement of adolescents in delinquency through their relationship with the institutional authorities of society. AIMS: To provide empirical evidence for the linkage of these perspectives, analysing the relationship between justice perceptions about teachers and the involvement of adolescents in deviant behaviour. Our hypotheses are that teachers' justice is negatively related with deviant behaviour and that this relationship is mediated through the evaluation of institutional authorities, after controlling for school failure. SAMPLE: Three hundred and ninety adolescents aged between 14 and 17 years. METHODS: Participants completed the following scales: perceptions of justice about teachers, evaluation of institutional authorities, and deviant behaviour. Data were examined through correlation and bootstrap analyses. RESULTS: Justice judgments about teachers were negatively related with deviant behaviour, and this relationship was partially mediated by the evaluation of institutional authorities, even after controlling for school failure. However, procedural justice revealed a much stronger relationship with deviance, compared to distributive justice. CONCLUSIONS: As predicted, these results suggest that when adolescents perceive school authorities as fair, other institutional authorities are likely to be perceived in a similar way and the more those authorities are positively evaluated, the less often adolescents engage in deviant conduct. Results are discussed according to the theories underlying our hypothesis. Directions for future research are suggested.

Degree of proximity in the construction of social representations: the case of intelligence.

The present article is devoted to the empirical endeavor of studying the effect of the degree of proximity, defined by specific socio-educational insertions, on the organization of social representations of intelligence. A questionnaire was answered by a sample of 752 participants belonging to five different social categories with different degrees of proximity and knowledge about intelligence: mothers, fathers, mother-teachers and non-parent students (psychology and science students). The questionnaire included different topics, namely concerning the concept of intelligence, its development and the effectiveness of teaching procedures. Results show that the principles organizing the contents of representations are linked to the personal involvement in intelligence, on which subjects more or less implied take different positions. Results produced suggest, therefore, that the content of representations is directly linked to the activation of social roles and the salience of the object, reflecting the functional character that the organization of representations has to specific social dynamics.