SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS AND GROUP MEMBERSHIP - SHARED AND DIFFUSED PARENTAL IDEAS IN 3 ISRAELI SETTINGS

The study investigates how the characteristics of subgroups within a c ulture are related to the structure of parental ideas held by their me mbers. Two subsets of social representations were suggested-shared par ental ideas (SPI) which are largely common to members of a group and s erve the goals of individuals as group members as well as the goals of the group itself, and-diffused parental ideas (DPI) which are dispers ed within social groups, and are instrumental in achieving individual goals. The respondents were kibbutz and two subgroups of urban parents with high and low levels of education (N=299) which differed in the e xtent of exposure to mainstream compared to group-specific parental id eas, the desirability of the group as indicated by its social status a nd the permeability of group boundaries. The findings were specific to the research task: only small differences in SPI and DPI were found a mong groups in a sorting task of child-rearing items; but major differ ences were found in their responses to a similar set of items organize d as a Likert-style questionnaire. Only DPI and no SPI were found in t he questionnaires of urban parents with low levels of education. In co ntrast, two similar clusters of SPI were identified in the kibbutz and among urban parents with high education. Another set of ideas was rec ognized as DPI in the kibbutz. The findings suggest that the Israeli u rban parents with a low education did not share the parental ideas wit h each other, or with urban-high and kibbutz parents, whereas similar parental ideas prevailed in the kibbutz and among middle-class urban p arents. Hypotheses were formulated regarding the group characteristics that foster the construction of SPI versus DPI by group members.