Student's social representations of education in residential care for adolescents at risk

This contribution studies the social representation of residential education for adolescent at risk, in a group of 130 students training to become educators. The students performed q-sorts (free grouping of items) utilizing 73 cards. On each card was written a negative behavior of the adolescents (22 cards), a positive behavior (21 cards) or and educational act (30 card). Similarities between items were defined by the number of respondents placing the items together in the same group (simple co-occurence); dissimilarities between respondents were defined by the pairbond measure for distance between categorizations. Scaling the items regarding adolescent behavior resulted in a configuration which grouped items in life areas such as "aggression", "respect for the house rules" and so on. The educational acts showed a different organization in terms of interaction style between educators and adolescent- symmetric as between equals or asymmetric as hierarchical- and by interaction intensity, from non conflictual collaboration to stressful relations. The paper presents evidence that these two configurations could underly the sort of nearly all (90%) respondents, and discusses the relevance of these results with respect to the proposal made by exponents of the structural approach to social representations