This study investigated the effect of two methods of eliciting data concerning environmental perception among children of Guadalajara, Mexico and Newton, Massachusetts. The two tasks used to assess children's perceptions of their environment were a cognitive mapping task commonly employed in previous research and a free-listing task. Data demonstrated that task specificity has a direct effect on the kind and quality of environmental elements children use to describe their environment. It is concluded that elicitation procedures should be examined thoroughly and systematically before developmental or comparative analysis is performed on experimental data.
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