Chapter 9 Interests and Their Structural Development: A Qualitative Content Analysis

Abstract

In Chapter 6, on theoretical reflections with respect to interests and their structural development, interests were perceived as a relation between the individual and the environment and to function as a self-regulating principle. In this chapter, a series of studies will be presented with the purpose of exploring the development of interests with children and adolescents aged 4 to 20 years. The status of these studies is exploratory, despite the fact that the examination of children’s interests is not a new topic in developmental psychology (cf. Bruhn, 1938). The common denominator for these studies is the assumption of a relationship between cognition and behavior--that is, “if cognition indeed has some relevance for an individual’s life, one should assume that there is some relationship between the way the individual thinks about his physical and social environment and the way he acts in it” (Lefebvre-Pinard, 1982, p. 25). Lefebvre-Pinard continues by stating that “this basic problem has, however, been largely neglected in psychology (Bandura, 1980) and constitutes probably the most serious failure of modern cognitive psychology (Nisbett & Ross, 1980)” (Lefebvre-Pinard, 1982, p. 25). Approximately 5 years later, following a discussion of studies relating social and cognitive variables to children’s planning abilities, Oppenheimer (1989) is still forced to conclude that “additional research is necessary to reach a proper understanding of planning processes and their relationship with actual behavior” (p. 60). This conclusion is the more embarassing because it illustrates the apparent lack of attention to the relationship between cognition and behavior which was already noted almost a decade earlier with respect to the relationship between social-cognition and social behavior (Shantz, 1983), and between the individual’s assessed level of moral reasoning and moral behavior in real-life situations (Flavell, 1977)