The Development of Political Understanding in Children Between 6-15 Years Old

Abstract

The origin of political understanding in Italian children from 6-iS years old was investigated by presenting them with a modified version of the story which Adelson and O'Neil (1966) used to study such reasoning in pre-adolescence and adolescence. Subjects (N = 80) were asked to state what several thousand people, who had arrived on a recently discovered island, would do in order to settle on it. Interviews were conducted focusing on the following points: collective needs, political organization, conflicts, and laws; for each topic, children's answers were ordered into developmental sequences. Young children were found to be unaware of conflicts, need for organization, and the function of laws. Eight to nine-year-old children, after some prompting, mentioned "chiefs"governing the island by means of orders and prohibitions, 10 to 11-year-olds mentioned collective needs and political or ganization without any prompting, and the 12 to 13-year-old group expressed the idea that it is the whole community that makes laws. A full understanding of conflict and the need for political organizations was found to characterize the conceptions of the oldest group (14-15).

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