International audienceThis article deals with the methodologies commonly used in the framework of the structural approach to social representations. It concerns free and hierarchical evocations, the characterization questionnaire, the similarity analysis, the basic cognitive schemes model, the attribute-challenge technique and the test of context independence. More than a simple review of these methodologies, it offers a critical approach concerning the problems encountered and related to: thresholds or “cutoff points” used to diagnose the structure (core vs. periphery) and the accuracy of the structural diagnosis, grouping methods employed to reduce the corpus of verbal associations, the dilemma between reliability and feasibility, especially in field research, the adequacy and number of modalities of response in the framework of the structural diagnosis. Following this evaluation, this article suggests potential solutions to overcome these methodological limitations. Moreover, as methodological issues are closely related to theoretical questions, the link between social representation theory and identity approaches is discussed

BackgroundPerceived legitimacy associated with rules and authorities is an important element for understanding and encouraging compliance with rules in the field of road safety, often more so than with a deterrence approach. Despite a growing interest in legitimacy in recent decades and in the psychological field in particular, its definitions and measurements appear to be heterogeneous, subject to debate and in need of a common theoretical framework. Therefore, one can expect these limitations to also concern the definitions and measurements of legitimacy in the field of road safety. However, no literature review related to this issue is currently available. This contribution therefore aims to fill this void by proposing a scoping review investigating, in the field of road safety, how legitimacy is defined, measured, related to compliance and what are its main determinants. MethodsA scoping review was conducted, based on research literature from eight databases and concerned with the perceived legitimacy of traffic rules or traffic enforcement and rule compliance or traffic violations. Twenty-six publications meeting inclusion criteria were retained. The characteristics and content of publications were analyzed to identify the relevant elements related to our research questions. Results and conclusionThe main results revealed that perceived legitimacy in the field of road safety can be related to different objects (i.e., traffic rules, traffic violations, traffic enforcement, institutions) that should be better delineated and differentiated in future research. While perceived legitimacy is generally associated with compliance with traffic rules, its theoretical definitions and measures in the field of road safety are heterogeneous and present validity issues which limit the comparability of studies and so the accumulation of knowledge for both theoretical research and road safety applications. No empirical study investigating the outcomes of perceived legitimacy beyond compliance was identified. Few empirical studies have investigated the determinants of perceived legitimacy. Most identified empirical studies were cross-sectional, which is a limitation to establishing causality in investigated relationships. Theoretical implications and research perspectives to improve studies on legitimacy in the field of road safety and develop a multidimensional model of the perceived legitimacy of traffic rules are therefore proposed and discussed.

Within the social representations' field of research, the "mute zone" hypothesis considers that some objects are characterized by counternormative content that people usually do not express in standard conditions of production. Within the framework of this approach, this study aims to explore the variations in the expression about the Gypsy community following the manipulation of different contexts and the issues associated with a pluri-methodological approach of data analysis. Indeed, two methodologies have been combined. The participants were asked to express themselves in public or in private. In addition, the identity of the experimenter was also manipulated as she presented herself as a Gypsy or not. Then, through a set of analyses based on a methodological triangulation approach, we were able to observe a recurrent modulation of the participants' answers. These analyses highlighted a greater incidence of the expression of counternormative elements when the context of expression was private and especially when the experimenter did not present herself as a Gypsy (p < .01, η p ² = .06). These results will be discussed in terms of the contribution of the methodologies employed and their comparison within the framework of the study of counternormative content.

To grasp how individuals and groups perceive social objects of their environment, word association tasks enable the cognitions associated with a given object to be collected. However, the lack of information regarding the meaning of these responses implies interpretation and subjectivity in their analysis. To reduce this subjectivity, this research aims to validate semantic contextualization (SC), a procedure that allows participants to explain the link they establish between their response and the object under study. In an experimental study, we asked 94 undergraduate students to

Evidence from past pro-environmental programs suggests that the invalidation of individuals’ expectations could lead them to drop out of a given program. The aim of this research is to evaluate the impact of the invalidation of expectations on individuals’ commitment to a waste-sorting program. We focused on the hierarchy that may exist among these expectations by drawing on the dichotomy between central and peripheral cognitions proposed within the framework of the theory of social representations. In this perspective, expectations are the result of a body of socially constructed knowledge and can be characterized either by a central (essential) or peripheral (non-essential) status. Results show that withdrawing from the program is significantly more frequent when the experimenter invalidates a central cognition than when he invalidates a peripheral one. This moderating effect highlights the importance of taking into account representations with a view to explaining or preventing withdrawal from pro-environmental programs.

The present study shows that the paradigm relative to Black Sheep Effect (BSE) may be used to reveal normative stakes whose existence is not clearly identified. To this end, our study focuses on alcohol drinking practices among students, specifically with regard to drinking contexts (solitary vs. group). Our hypothesis was that the drinking norms are determined by their context (i.e. social vs. solitary drinking). More specifically, we suggested that social drinking is viewed by students as pro-normative, while solitary drinking is viewed as anti-normative. The results confirmed our hypotheses and enable us to consider that the BSE paradigm has the potential to reveal normative stakes.

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The characterization questionnaire is inspired by Q-sort methodologies (i.e. qualitative sorting). It consists in asking participants to give their opinion on a list of items by sorting them into categories depending on their level of characterization of the object. This technique allows us to obtain distributions for each item and each response modality (i.e. characteristic vs. not chosen vs. not characteristic). This contribution intends to analyze these frequencies by means of correspondence factor analysis. The originality of this contribution lies in the fact that this kind of analysis has never been used to process data collected by means of this questionnaire. The procedure will be detailed and exemplified by means of two empirical studies on social representations of the good wine and the good supermarket. The interests of such a contribution will be discussed from both methodological points of view and an applications perspective.