| This dissertation addressed how lower-middle class European-American children and adults make sense of the everyday economic world. The study compared adults' and 7--8 and 11--12 year old children's intuitive understanding of economic exchanges; it determined the extent to which participants were attuned to and applied non-economic motives and values in construing economic transactions (e.g., social relationships, wealth-need considerations, moral and other normative factors, and affect); and, it examined the functional relationship between economic and non-economic motives and values in their economic understanding. The participants' economic understanding was based on their expectations, reactions to breach scenarios, and vocabularies of appraisal that were associated with everyday economic exchange practices.;The dissertation found that adults and children are concerned about and therefore focus their attention on individual, personal, and familiar economic practices, not on aggregated or generalized economic activities, relationships, or systems. As it turns out, by concentrating on the latter, previous research on children's economic understanding seriously under-estimated what children comprehend about the economic world and the extent to which their understanding is shared with adults.;The present investigation also observed that children and adults rely on economic and non-economic values and motives to guide their interpretation of economic practices. Previous research largely ignored children's use of non-economic values and motives in creating meaning out of their encounters with the economic world.;The dissertation also showed that the influence of non-economic values and motives in the exercise of economic practices becomes significantly greater as children grow into adulthood. The increasing "contextualization" of economic practices with age contrasts dramatically with the "context-dependent-to-context-free" direction of developmental change typically read about in the literature.;The study also discerned that adults' and children's broadest and most consistent agreement in construing economic practices is based on the affect or attitudes associated with the exchange practices. Few studies in the past treated the relation between children's and adults' affect and economic understanding.;Finally, implications were drawn regarding practice-based economic understanding and, separately, the cultural valuing of affect and other non-economic factors in economic decision-making. Future directions for research on these and related topics were also suggested. |
