Adolescents' Social Representations Of Chinese Traditional Culture And Its Relationship With National Identity

China is a country with five-thousand-year history of ancient civilization. The long-deposited Chinese traditional culture is broad and deep, and would bring far-reaching impact to the individuals who living in it. The present study was carried out to investigate the presentations of Chinese traditional culture in the eyes of adolescent in qualitative and quantitative manners, and to explore the connotation, structure of Chinese traditional culture and its effect on the adolescents, according to the social representation theory.The study was divided into three stages. First, focus group interview was carried out on four age groups with total testees of 180 to obtain the social representations of Chinese traditional culture. 629 words were considered as the culture representations, and were further classified into 19 items by assignment analysis. Second, based on the results of the qualitative research in the first stage, a preliminary questionnaire about the social representations of the Chinese traditional culture was designed to acquire the structure of Chinese traditional culture and the factors influencing the cognition of traditional culture. Then, the questionnaire was revised according to the results of the preparatory test and was put into test on 742 adolescents. Third, the applied functions of social representations were investigated, i.e., the correlation between the social representation of Chinese traditional culture and the ethnic identity. The main results of the study are as follows:1. The adolescents had a profuse view on Chinese traditional culture. No significant difference of social representations was observed among the four age groups, except that the number of cognition in some specific item showed some difference.2. The social representations of Chinese traditional culture on adolescents could be expressed as a multi-dimension model. "Literary and historical culture", "ethical culture" and "idealistic culture" constructed the core of Chinese traditional culture. The dimension processing accorded with the characteristics of the concept of "culture".3. The score level of adolescents on the representations of Chinese traditional culture showed a positive state.4. The score of postgraduates on the social representation were highest among all the age groups. The score of adolescents from the country on social representations were lower, and the parental education as well as annual family income also influenced the cognitive level of traditional culture. Though demography variables showed some effect on the score level, they only contribute 8.2% to the explanation of the social representations of Chinese traditional culture.5. As part of the core of Chinese traditional culture, significant difference existed in the identity level of the "ideaistic cultur". Adolescents with predominant conditions showed significantly lower identity level than that of the others.6. The social representations of Chinese traditional culture could be classified into internal factors and external factors. Some items, such as totem or symbol, distinctive tradition food, traditional festival and classical art, etc, are the internal factors which reflected that adolescents are thoroughly familiar with traditional culture. The other items are the external factors.7. The social representations of Chinese traditional culture positively correlated with the Chinese ethnic identity. Except the "ethical culture" did not correlate with the emotional dimension in the ethnic identity scale, the other dimensions showed significant correlation. In the regression equation, the "idealistic culture" dimension contributed the maximum explanation to the equation, which regression coefficient was 0.615.