UNDERSTANDING PEACE AND WAR - A REVIEW OF DEVELOPMENTAL-PSYCHOLOGY RESEARCH

Over the past decades the number of studies dealing with the developin g understanding of peace and war among children and adolescents has co nsiderably increased. No coherent overview is available despite this i ncrease. The purpose of this review is to address this absence and to offer a systematic discussion of early and contemporary studies. Besid es the absence of a coherent review, most studies fail to offer a theo retical framework for the interpretation and examination of the develo ping understanding of peace and war. In the discussion of the literatu re it is shown that there is no overall consensus about the meaning of peace and war. For instance, children and adolescents in different cu ltural settings (i.e., geographically different areas or countries) ar e reported to differ in the development of the meanings they attach to peace and war. Early and contemporary studies offer ample evidence, n ot only for a dependency of thr findings on employed measurement proce dures and designs, but also for the apparent presence of a multitude o f variables which affect the development of the understanding of peace and war. In all early and in most contemporary studies, age and gende r are the major explanatory variables for the observed variations. In more recent studies indications are presented for a structural relatio nship between the understanding of interpersonal relationships and the understanding of peace, in particular. The influence of other variabl es such as social institutions and socialization agents on the develop ment of this understanding appears to be primarily theoretically discu ssed, but rarely empirically supported. (C) 1998 Academic Press.