The representation of authority: an adolescent viewpoint

It is argued in this paper that participation of young people in society is to a degree a function of their attitudes towards those in authority. More specifically the research reports results from an investigation designed to assess young people's attitudes (n = 2046) to parents, teachers and police taken together as a multivariate representation of authority. The results, at both scale and item level, provide little support for the position often taken in the literature that adolescents are generally anti-authority. On the contrary the evidence points in the opposite direction with favourable attitudes being displayed to all three authority roles but in particular towards police and parents. Some of the complexities inherent in such research are pointed up with attitude to authority, represented as a tripartite dependent vector variable, being seen to vary with individual attributes such as sex and age and contextual variables such as school attended. In general girls exhibit a more favourable attitude to authority than boys, authority relationships weaken with age and organisation of schools in terms of "caring" principals result in a weakening of adult-authority relationships.