Both in social science and in everyday life, ‘respect’ is an important and widely used term to describe positive conduct of one person towards another. However, just what respectful behaviour refers to, and how it can be differentiated from considerate, tolerant, kind, etc. behaviour continues to elude social-scientific analysis. In order to investigate the meaning that people give to the concept of respect, the authors carried out focus groups in that participants discussed two vignettes regarding respect and a very closely related concept – considerateness. A systematic analysis of the transcripts preliminary supported the study’s hypothesis that respect is a form of behaviour which refers to the ascribed agency of another person, as opposed to non-agential properties such as needs or feelings.
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