The explanatory production among fourth-graders to ninth-graders: Impact of institutional and social demands on the development of unstable internal causality

摘要

The causal explanation has an effect: (1) on expectancy and value at an intra-individual level (Weiner, 2000); (2) on feeling and affective evaluation at an interpersonal level (Weiner 2000); and (3) on institutional judgment at an organizational level (Dubois, 2003). A study was conducted with pupils between the 4th and 9th grades in order to explore how evident these constraints are in the production of causal explanations in response to daily events The analyses of variance performed on the number of explanations produced (for each type of explanation — internal stable, internal, unstable, external stable and external unstable) indicated, firstly, that the number of explanations of all four types increased with school grade. Secondly, academic events elicited more internal unstable explanations and did so to a greater extent as school grade increased. They also elicited more internal stable explanations and fewer external (stable or unstable) explanations than non-academic events. Thirdly, pupils produced more internal stable explanations in response to positive compared to negative events, whereas the reverse was observed for internal unstable explanations. These results are discussed in reference to the two constraints involved in explanations of daily events: an organisational constraint relating to the existence of social valorization of internal explanations and an intra-individual constraint bound to the preservation of self-esteem.