Abstract

The issue of rights in the perspective of social representations constitutes, at the moment, a recent and rather systematic field of study, on the side of contents and of methodology of research. This note particularly highlights the progress in the field of children's rights, taking the Molinari & Emiliani's study (1999) as paradigmatic point of reference. The findings are presented of a piece of research in Campania on university students (no. = 200), with a comparative-type objective, and of instruments and elaboration procedures validation. The main aim of this research was to verifying the influence of different study curricula and of contexts on the social representations of minors' rights. Data analysis, directly compared with the previous study, contribute in validating the instruments and methodology in this field of research and, at the same time, show the relevance of subjects' socio-cultural membership. In fact, differently by the Emilian psycholgy students, who give more relevance to the action for a concrete assertion of minors' rights by each person, and also by themselves, in southern Italy a greater assumption of personal responsibility emerged on the part of law students. This evidence may be explained considering the specificity of children's condition in the social context in which these subjects live and in which they presume they will be called to exercise their professions in the future.