Interwar Romania: Historical Analysis and Social Representation

Historical research includes themes and topics that are exclusively reserved to experts in the field and themes of general interest that are open to all interested parties. The latter ones are included in what the social representation theory (Moscovici, 1961) calls “social objects.” The interwar period has this status, including interwar Romania. In a bidisciplinary approach—contemporary history and social psychology (TRS)—we were interested in three aspects: 1. to indicate the structure of the convergence-divergence pattern in the approaches used by the specialists on this topic; 2. to identify the configuration of the social representation of interwar Romania—in the case of an audience qualified in this topic by their academic specialization (history and economic sciences) and profession;and 3. to measure its variability, determined by the distance to the object—in its various operationalizations (this article, the first in a series, stops at gender differences). The opinions of 11 specialists and the answers of 202 subjects (50% F, 50% M) were analyzed. The first conclusions refer to finding the structure of the convergence-divergence pattern in the specialists’ works as well as in the case of the social representation of interwar Romania and in the existence of significant differences introduced by the gender variable. Both findings are premises in subsequent stages: the investigation of the variability of this representation depending on specialization, the age categories of the subjects of this type of audience, and also at the common sense level.