Work for Home, School, or Labor Force: The Nature and Sources of Changes in Understanding

This review integrates and extends research on the nature and sources of changing perceptions of work in childhood and adolescence by (a) treating those perceptions as a form of social cognition, (b) considering 3 work settings (home, school, and paid work) and 3 aspects of understanding (of categories, procedures, and interconnections among forms of work), and (c) dealing with several correlates: age, gender, cohort, and social position. The review specifies changes and presents a general picture of change and variation based on the accessibility of information, the individual's ability to deal with that information, and the individual's interest. This picture, it is proposed, is extendable to changing perceptions of work at later ages and to content areas other than work.