What Do Secondary Education Students Understand About Social Justice? Students Representations of Social Justice in Different Regions of Spain.

Abstract

This quantitative empirical research analyses secondary school students’ representations of social justice in different regions of Spain. ‘Social Justice Representation Questionnaire- SJRQ’ has been designed and implemented to conduct an empirical analysis of Social Justice in the field of education. This instrument is based on the three dimensional model of social justice (redistribution, recognition and representation). Participants of this study were 3229 secondary education students from 12 to 21 years old. The participants belong to 20 public schools in five Autonomous Communities of Spain. This study aims to determine how the concept of social justice develops in secondary education students of different educational levels and whether gender is a relevant variable. The results confirm that social justice representations of secondary education students follow a developmental trend because students of upper educational levels have a closer vision to social justice. Also, females manifest a greater predisposition towards social justice than males. This study confirm that SJRQ is a useful tool to train Social Justice oriented citizens and to develop training programs adapted to different understanding levels.