Argentine adolescents? possible selves: The constraints of socio-economic disadvantage

BARREIRO, ALICIA; WAINRYB, CECILIA; ARSENIO, WILLIAM F.

Congreso; Jean Piaget Society 50th Annual Meeting ?Constructivism?; 2021

Jean Piaget Society

Argentina, where this study was conducted, features profound inequalities. In the last decades, researchers began exploring the psychological mechanisms that serve to rationalize and perpetuate unjust social systems (e.g., Jost, 2018), but very little is still understood about how growing up amidst profound inequality constrains the ways adolescents project themselves into the future. In the present study we focused on three groups of adolescents from different socio-economic status. Participants were 597 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 18 (M = 15.11, SD = 1.87; 57 % female). Participants? possible selves were assessed via an open-ended measure adapted from the Possible Selves Questionnaire (Oyserman, 2004). Adolecents? answers were coded into 3 main broad goals: academic, work and personal. The findings showed that youths from more impoverished environments had a more restricted view of their possible selves?one that tended to favor relational achievements, curtailed self-improvement and identity concerns, and included fewer college-bound and professional goals. It thus appears that one route by which socio-economic disadvantages affect youths? future is by constraining their imagining of their possible selves and perhaps making it less likely that they can construct pathways for social mobility, thereby maintaining social inequality and perpetuating the status quo.