Personal responsibility and justice: How do Czech adolescents understand dilemmatic cornerstones of history
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| Year of publication | 2005 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In adolescence, child should build new social relations and develop social skills. The adolescents own experience as well as the transmitted experience of others enables her/him understand the situations with which she/he is faced and enables one to plan her/his actions. The communications of shared experience establish common understanding of life-situations within a group (Markova, 2003). These semantic and symbolic structures - we can relate them to Moscovicis social representations (Moscovici, 1984) - provide individuals with general and dynamic, history based and experience based frame for their opinions and believes. The adolescents are not passive when they are developing the representations of events that happened many years ago. The historical events and terms are seen and discussed from the present point of view with respect to actual experience. Our research has aimed to find and explain how adolescents understand questionable part of Czech history. Seven groups of Czech adolescents (aged from 16 to 25) were presented with dilemma - real life-story of a man who varied between position of victim to communist regime and position of evildoer in fifties. This dilemmatic situation has addressed both concept of responsibility and concept of justice. We used the thematic analysis (Tyrlik, Macek, 2002) in order to find social representations, which originate opinions and actions of adolescents. We found three multidimensional thematic structures. All of them include evaluative dimension but differ in antecedent dimensions and just consequences. In the case of the first theme, preceding internal (personal) evil and awareness of tragic results of own behaviour result in necessity of punishment. The second theme consists of relation between personal admission of the guilt and the punishment/pardon. The third theme shows the pardon more acceptable in the case the offence was frequent at the age of fifties. |
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