Relativism and stations of epistemic doubt.
This sequence of studies examined the role that relativistic thinking plays in the cognitive and social-emotional lives of adolescents. Study 1 introduces an assessment strategy and associated descriptive model employed in evaluating how 70 concrete and formal operational adolescents differently interpret and resolve problems involving competing knowledge claims. A second study explored the relations between the epistemic orientations evidenced by 61 of these subjects and their current level of identity development. Study 3 compared the epistemic assumptions of a group of 29 psychiatrically hospitalized adolescents with those of a matched group of normal controls. Results from these studies indicate that relativistic approaches to problems of belief entitlement are: a) routinely characteristic of most normal adolescents; b) available to formal operational, but not concrete operational individuals; c) associated with more mature ego-identity statuses; and d) typically absent in groups of psychiatrically hospitalized youth.
Chandler
M
M
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
Boyes
M
M
Ball
L
L
D000293:Adolescent; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006760:Hospitalization; D006801:Humans; D007207:Individuation; D008297:Male; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D000297:Psychology, Adolescent; D013850:Thinking