ABSTRACT

This study attempts to explore ways in which the social learning takes place through classification schemes youths use to describe and evaluate residential settings, as well as the meaning they are likely to draw from the categories. The ways in which people discriminately group different stimuli and treat them alike, or equivalence making, is a part of their cognitive development, and a process rarely approached in formal education. This research attempts to explore teenagers’ perceptions of the social meaning of the environment. The research design included 150 high school students, residing in urban and rural settings, who were asked to describe similarities and differences between 12 selective photographs of residential settings. A content analysis of the sorting techniques revealed descriptive and affective categories as well as hierarchial preference patterns corresponding to their environmental experiences.