Social constructionism

Many people confuse the concepts of constructivism and social constructionism or use the terms interchangeably (Crotty, 1998; Gergen, 1985; Patton, 2002). Like constructivism, social constructionism challenges the idea that there is some objective basis for claims to knowledge or ‘truth’ and examines the process of knowledge construction, but instead of focusing on the matter of individual minds and cognitive processes, it looks outward to the world of the intersubjective social construction of meaning and knowledge (Schwandt, 1994). Crotty (1998, p.58) provides a useful explanation of the distinction between the two:

Constructivism points out the unique experience of each of us. It suggests that each one’s way of making sense of the world is valid and worthy of respect as any other, thereby tending to scotch any hint a critical spirit. On the other hand, social constructionism emphasises the hold our culture has on us: it shapes the way we see things (even in the way we feel things) and gives us quite a definitive view of the world.

Social constructionism challenges the objective basis of conventional knowledge and commonly accepted understandings by illustrating how the criteria for identifying and classifying phenomena are exceedingly constrained by socio-cultural and historical context (Berger & Luckman, 1966; Latour & Woolgar, 1979; Gergen, 1985). According to Gergen (1985), the social constructionist framework is based on four core

i. Scientific knowledge is not a decontextualised reflection or map of the world but is an artefact of the social interchanges that take place among people: the process of understanding is not automatically driven by the forces of nature, but is the result of an active, cooperative enterprise of persons in a relationship.

ii. The social interchanges from which scientific knowledge derives are historically situated.

iii. The degree to which a scientific theory or perspective prevails is not dependent on the empirical validity of the theory but on the vicissitudes of social processes within the scientific community.

iv. Descriptions and explanations of the world serve to sustain and support certain social patterns to the exclusion of others (Gergen, 1985).

According to this view, child psychology, like the children it seeks to describe, is a cultural invention that derives from the ideologies and practices of the larger culture (Kessen, 1979). Historical investigation, for example, has revealed that the concept of childhood is not a biological given but is socially and historically constructed (Walkerdine, 2008). In the Middle Ages, childhood was not considered a specialised phase of development: children mixed freely with adults and were seen more as ‘little adults’ than as a distinct social age group (Aries, 1960). This serves to highlight how concepts such as childhood are not direct reflections of the entities and objects themselves but are lodged in historically contingent factors (Gergen, 1985). Scholars have also argued that what passes as ‘fact’ in child psychology is highly dependent on the same social processes identified by Latour and Woolgar (1979) in their ethnographic study of how ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ are ‘discovered’ in natural science laboratories; primarily, through communication, negotiation, rhetoric and conflict. Gergen (1985) asserts that a theory of child development can be retained despite variations in children’s conduct and, conversely, a theory can be abandoned despite the stability or repetition of their conduct: the retention or abandonment of a theory is determined by social processes within a community of interlocutors.

Within the field of developmental psychology, social constructionists have advanced a powerful critique of the positivist goal of identifying structural fundamentals of growth that, regardless of social, cultural, or historical context: an approach often described as ‘carving nature at the joints’ (Jahoda, 1992). William Kessen’s (1979, p. 815) pioneering paper ‘The American child and other cultural inventions’was one of the first to urge developmental psychologists to ‘peer into the abyss of the positivistic nightmare – that the child is essentially and eternally a cultural invention and that the variety of the child’s definition is not the removable error of an incomplete science’. In his paper, Kessen (1979) illustrated how the economic, political, social and ideological climate of 19th century America laid the foundations for a particular kind of developmental psychology, one in which the child is invariably conceived as an independent being who develops as a self-contained complete individual, and upheld as the single, proper unit of

developmental analysis. Woodhead (1999) has argued that it is this singular focus on the child that has permitted the formulation of universal laws of growth deemed applicable to all children, regardless of social, cultural, or historical context (Woodhead, 1999).

When Kessen’s paper was first published, child development as a social construction was only just beginning to be taken seriously. Indeed, some authors in the field continue to adhere steadfastly to positivist scientific principles. As Schaffer (1993, p.38) contends:

Developmental psychology today is a truly objective science…Today a developmentalist determines the adequacy of a theory by deriving hypotheses and conducting research to see whether the theory can predict the observations he or she has made. There is no room for subjective bias in evaluating ideas: theories of human development are only as good as their ability to account for the important aspects of children’s growth and development.

Despite such declarations, over the last three decades, developmental psychologists have become increasingly willing to recognise that research is a cultural practice, driven by certain patterns of social exchange which do not reveal childhood so much as construct it (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Kessen, 1976; Kessen& Siegel, 1983; Richards, 1974; Richards & Light, 1986; Woodhead, 2000; Walkerdine, 2008).

In one of the most compelling social constructionist analyses of developmental psychology, Valerie Walkerdine (2008) has used a Foucaultian framework to illustrate how certain historical ‘conditions of possibility’ (c.f. Foucault, 1979) contrive to make the emergence of developmental psychology seem both natural and inevitable. She traces the origins of modern developmental psychology back to the late 19th century and the introduction of compulsory schooling, the goal of which was to produce rational, civilised adults capable of participating in a liberal government. At the time, it was believed that this could only be achieved with an education that worked with and not against children’s nature, making it necessary to know what that nature was.

At this time, Darwin’s theory of evolution was becoming well known. Darwin (1859/2003) argued that human nature is not simple bedrock but has been formed by a process of phylogeny (change and adaptation to an environment over long periods of pre-historical time). What is important for the study of children, Walkerdine (2008) argues, is that he extended this idea of phylogeny to ontogeny - the development or course of development for an individual organism. It was in this way that childhood came to be viewed as a developmental process in which adaptation to the environment was understood as a natural stage-wise progression towards a rational, civilised adulthood. The best known exponent of this approach is Jean Piaget (1952, 1955, 1960), who attempted to demonstrate the evolution or successive adaptation of structures of reasoning up until the attainment of adult ‘rationality’.

childhood is a distinct state which follows a stage-wise progression towards adulthood. Nevertheless, this argument ignores ‘that specific history demonstrates not a simple path of progress towards knowledge, but a political project of liberalism which drew on scientific studies for its rationale. In this analysis, the production of the rational subject for liberalism is central’ (Walkerdine, 2008, p.116). What this analysis helps us understand is that the truth of Piaget’s and others’ claims about development are not timeless or universal scientific realities but are produced in a particular historical moment as an effect of power. Specifically, concerns about the production of the rational, civilised individual and the formulation of a naturalistic developmental sequence to achieve that are part of the technologies of population management (Foucault, 1979). As Walkerdine (2008) asserts, there can be no timeless truth about childhood, only understandings of how childhood is produced at any one time and place, and an imperative to understand the kind of childhood we want to produce.

Whilst social constructionism offers no foundational rules of what constitutes ‘truth’, this does not mean that ‘anything goes’. Gergen (1985) points out that because scientific knowledge systems derive from social processes within communities of interlocutors, scientific activity will always be governed in large measure by normative rules. Social constructionism simply invites researchers to view these rules as historically and culturally situated, and as being subject to critique and transformation. This approach has the dual advantage of providing the stability of shared understandings within scientific communities while circumventing the stultifying effects of doctrinaire conventions. Moreover, the recognition of scientific knowledge as a social construct sharpens the lens on the moral implications of scientific practice. In the spirit of the early pragmatist philosophers, such as John Dewey (1929), social constructionism prevents scientists from justifying socially deplorable conclusions on the grounds that they are ‘scientific facts’: on the contrary, they must consider the moral ramifications of their conclusions for the broader society (Gergen, 1985). As Dewey (1930, p.196) surmised, ‘the final import of the conclusions as to knowledge resides in the changed idea it enforces into action’.

This research on children’s knowledge of bushfire hazards and disasters is underpinned by both constructivist and social constructionist philosophies. Like other research in this philosophical tradition, it seeks to understand how the people in a particular setting have constructed reality, it explores their reported perceptions, truths, explanations, beliefs and world views and the consequences of those views for their own behaviours and for those with whom they interact (Patton, 2002). It also acknowledges that the research findings are mediated by the researcher’s own views on the world and social life within that world (Crotty, 1998). My own views on the world, insofar as they relate to this research, are expounded in the following section which explicates my theoretical perspective and provides a context and logic for evaluating the outcomes of the research.

3.3 Theoretical perspective

A theoretical perspective is a stance expounding one’s view of the world and of social life within that world (Crotty, 1998). It makes clear the theoretical assumptions brought to the research task, provides a context for the research process, and grounds the logic and criteria of the adopted methodology (Crotty, 1998). This research was based on the assumptions of three separate, yet complementary, theoretical perspectives: symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969), socio-cultural psychology (Cole, 1996a, 1996b; Rogoff, 2003; Vygotsky, 1978), the ecological theory of human development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), and the new sociology of childhood (James & Prout, 1990, 2005). The assumptions of each of perspective and its implications for the research will now be explained.