An Assessment of Written Responses to Conflict Imagery by Northern Ireland Art and Non-Art Students

Abstract

This study examines the written responses of art and non-art students in Northern Ireland to a series of images related to conflict using Stavropoulos' (1992) Diagnostic Profile (DP). Stavropoulos' instrument is primarily designed to offer a more complex and nuanced insight into the analysis of art images using four dimensions: descriptive, formal, interpretative, and historical. It is evident that even though the art students achieve overall higher scores than the non-art students, it might have been expected that they would have shown greater evidence of more specific knowledge-based elements in their accounts. This finding might imply that the delivery of the art curriculum in Northern Ireland pays insufficient attention to the formal and historical aspects of the subject, but rather has encouraged the students to rely on more descriptive and interpretative judgments which are insufficiently rooted in the formal traditions of the subject. This study also uses an additional fifth social/psychological dimension, developed by the present researcher, to identify the social attributions and coping strategies used by children affected by the conflict in Northern Ireland. Specifically, this study scrutinizes the social attributions of 159 Protestant and Catholic art and non-art high school students living in real conflict zones of Belfast. The findings suggest that there is a proliferation of fear, harm and loss attributions in the children's written responses. Related to this is the extent to which attributions reflecting outgroup/ingroup themes and issues related to religious/ideological support, stereotyping and social representation categorizations are also present. It is also apparent that some children possess something that is akin to a ”political” intelligence. The findings also imply that some children use coping strategies to live in what Rackstraw (2001) refers to as ”idealized worlds”. It may be that the evidence of these themes is related to psychological needs arising from living in, or being close to, areas of political conflict.