Different But Equal? A Developmental Analysis of Variability in Adolescents' Understandings of Social Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Coming of age in an increasingly diverse social world, contemporary youth must make sense of the complexities of social differences and the disparities that exist between privileged and marginalized groups. This mixed methods study had two main objectives: (1) to examine adolescents’ understandings of social justice through their social awareness and perspective taking in the areas of racism, sexism, and classism; and (2) to assess whether these understandings varied as a function of cognitive (critical thinking, moral judgment) and affective (empathy) skills. Ninety-eight adolescents in Grades 9 and 12, evenly divided by sex, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, completed a questionnaire measuring their awareness of social (in)justice in society at large and also participated in a semi-structured interview designed to assess their perspective-taking in hypothetical peer conflicts depicting these problems. Results showed that adolescents were moderately aware of social injustice overall, demonstrating greatest awareness of classism and least awareness of sexism. Qualitative analyses of interview responses revealed five levels of perspective taking, signifying increasingly mature interpretations of group differences. On average, participants assumed a `nominal` perspective that was naïve to social disparities and emphasized concerns about ‘equality’ over ‘equity’. Perspective taking was most sophisticated in the area of racism and least regarding sexism. Variability was also observed across grade, social location, and cognitive and affective skills. As expected, older adolescents demonstrated more mature understandings of social justice than younger adolescents. Furthermore, age-related differences were larger among adolescents attending higher SES schools. Minority youth showed greater awareness of racism than majority participants. Females demonstrated more mature understandings of sexism than males, and adolescents attending higher SES schools showed more mature understandings of classism than their lower SES counterparts. In addition, controlling for the effects of grade moral judgment predicted both social awareness and perspective taking, having the greatest effect in the area of classism and weakest in the area of sexism. Similarly, adolescents’ empathy levels predicted perspective taking in the area of sexism. These findings underline the importance of fostering adolescents’ understandings of social justice for the development of attitudes and behaviours that promote equity among all members of society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".