Abstract
Background/Context Research indicates that social perspective taking—the capacity to discern the thoughts and feelings of others—plays a role in many important outcomes in schools. Despite the potential benefits for students and educators, little is known about social perspective taking (SPT) as a process. Purpose/Research Question If educational researchers are ultimately to design interventions to help improve the perspective-taking capacities of those in schools, they need to fully understand the underlying process, that is, how social perspective taking actually happens. Particularly important is the need to understand what strategies individuals use and what sources of evidence they draw from when they take the perspective of others. Participants To investigate this question, a sample of 18 adults from an array of different professions (who were nominated as adept perspective takers) and 13 high school students (who were nominated as struggling with social perspective taking) participated in the study. Research Design Participants completed in-depth interviews and a “think-aloud” protocol as part of this mixed-method exploratory study. The interviews and think-alouds were coded for the type of social perspective taking that strategy participants employed and for the sources of evidence they relied on, respectively. Findings Results indicated that participants relied on 12 different types of SPT strategies and drew from seven different sources of evidence when discerning others’ thoughts and feelings. Conclusions/Recommendations These findings provide foundational knowledge that lays groundwork for ultimately developing approaches to teach social perspective taking. At a practical level, these findings provide options for students and educators to experiment with as they attempt to take the perspective of one another.
Highlights
Executive Summary: More and more studies indicate that social perspective taking (SPT) – perceivers’ motivation and ability to discern the thoughts and feelings of targets – is associated with a host of valuable outcomes
The current article serves as a companion article to that piece and extends the examination of SPT motivation to SPT ability
This study explores the following research questions: 1) What strategies do individuals employ in their SPT attempts? 2) What sources of evidence do individuals rely upon when taking the perspective of others? In combination with the companion article, the goal of this line of research is to provide a knowledge-base from which scholars might begin to learn the best way to teach SPT to educators and students
Summary
The methodological approach employed in this study closely parallels the approach described in Gehlbach, et al (this volume). To meet the study’s goals of documenting and understanding the range of strategies and sources of evidence that people rely on in their SPT attempts, we used the same heterogeneous sample of perspective takers described in the companion study. We asked a different set of questions during the interview to learn about the SPT strategies that participants used. Participants The same core tensions we faced in the companion study were present for this investigation. We had to balance our goal of documenting the range of strategies and sources of evidence as fully as possible with our goal of understanding these two important components of the SPT process in depth. We wanted to ensure that our findings would include strategies and sources of evidence representative of the type of SPT that would occur in schools
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