Teadlaste ja inseneride sotsiaalne representatsioon noorte hulgas
Date
2010
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
Description
This master thesis concentrates on social representation of researchers and engineers among
youth. The author sought answers to questions how young people represent researchers and
engineers, what are their attitudes towards these careers and what kind of discoursive schemas
are constructing the attitudes. Also was author‘s goal to find possible explanations why young
people are not very into being researchers or engineers, although as they think these careers
are necessary and have great societal impact.
The research is based on socialconstructivist paradigm, what defines reality to be socially
constructed and also on theories of communication and social psychology concerning the
empirical data collected. As the methodics of the thesis assumes that the text is viewed and
analyzed in relation with it‘s wider social and societal context, there are also reviews of the
most important empirical research of the context (values of Estonians, gender roles, estonian
student‘s results in international education surveys and researchers imago in media) in the
theoretic part of the thesis.
Two focusgroup- interviews were conducted with 11 grade girls and boys (aged 17-18) in
Pärnu Ühisgümnaasium. The research methodics for the transcriptions of the interviews was
developed according to the research questions. The main methods were text- and discourse
analysis. Analysis focuses on the vocabulary chosen by youth, assumptions hidden in the text
and interpretative repertoire‘s.
Main results are as follows. Young people concider researchers and engineers to be very clever
and intelligent, really important for the society and they are represented as energetic actors, at
the same time on the bases of individuals young people stigmatised them and emphasized their
exeptionality. From the interpretative repertoire‘s of concerning the career choices generally it
came out that the centered criteria in career choices is high personal interest and
individualistic-discoursive choises are strongly connected with the social identities concidered
to be „ normal“ . Representational to the vocabulary describing social roles of researchers and
engineers was the look towards future, what refers to social distance of these roles from our
every-day lives. The social representation of researchers and engineers is influenced from
traditional gender roles – as stereotypes these careers are associated to male gender and women
are represented as marginal and exceptional. In general, attitudes of the boys are somewhat
more positive then the attitudes of the girls towards the careers of researchers and engineers.
An important conclusion of my research concerning the definition of success only to be the
top-position in the youth`s interpretative repertoire`s and widely spread gender-stereotypes, is
that different aspects and multifacetedness of the researcher`s and engineers careeers is needed
to be introduced to youth. Also it necessary to recontextualise young people`s concept of
success linking it with using one`s interests and ability`s, to bring down the stereotypes.
Keywords
magistritööd, teadus, tehnoloogia, teadlased, insenerid, elukutsed, noored, sotsiaalne representatsioon, Eesti