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Summer camps in Canada provide services to hundreds of thousands of youth each year, giving opportunities for growth and development. However, summer camps in Canada remain understudied. Using one phase of data from the Canadian Summer Camps Research Project (CSCRP), analysis was conducted on the effect of camper self-concept on their environmental awareness, mediated by perceived level of social inclusion. A relationship between camper self-concept and environmental awareness existed, and that relationship was enhanced when campers were socially included. These findings show preliminary connections between self-concept and environmental awareness in summer camps, and open opportunities for further research into personal and long-term effects of camp participation on environmental viewpoints, social group integration, and self-concept.

AbstractWe test a method for applying a network-based approach to the study of political attitudes. We use cognitive-affective mapping, an approach that visually represents attitudes as networks of concepts that an individual associates with a given issue. Using a software tool called Valence, we asked a sample of Canadians (n= 111) to draw a cognitive-affective map (CAM) of their views on the carbon tax. We treat these networks as a series of undirected graphs and examine the extent to which support for the tax can be predicted based on each graph's emotional and structural properties. We find evidence that the emotional but not the structural properties significantly predict individuals' attitudes toward the carbon tax. We also find associations between CAMs' structural properties (density and centrality) and several measures of political interest. Our results provide preliminary evidence for the efficacy of CAMs as a tool for studying political attitudes. The study data are available athttps://osf.io/qwpvd/?view_only=6834a1c442224e72bf45e7641880a17f

We describe and illustrate a new method of graphically diagramming disputants' points of view called cognitive-affective mapping. The products of this method—cognitive-affective maps (CAMs)—represent an individual's concepts and beliefs about a particular subject, such as another individual or group or an issue in dispute. Each of these concepts and beliefs has its own emotional value. The result is a detailed image of a disputant's complex belief system that can assist in-depth analysis of the ideational sources of the dispute and thereby aid its resolution. We illustrate the method with representations of the beliefs of typical individuals involved in four contemporary disputes of markedly different type: a clash over German housing policy, disagreements between Israelis over the meaning of the Western Wall, contention surrounding exploitation of Canada's bitumen resources, and the deep dispute between people advocating action on climate change and those skeptical about the reality of the problem.

We propose a complex systems approach to the study of political belief systems, to overcome some of the fragmentation in the current scholarship on ideology. We review relevant work in psychology, sociology, and political science and identify major cleavages in the literature: the spatial vs. non-spatial divide (ideologies as reducible to a spatially organized set of dimensions vs. as complex conceptual structures) and the person-group problem (ideologies as driven by psychological needs of individuals vs. by institutional and power structures of society). We argue that construing ideologies as conceptual networks of cognitive-affective representations embedded in social networks of people may provide a path for bridging these existing gaps and epistemological disputes. Tools from cognitive science and computational social science such as cognitive-affective mapping, connectionist simulations, and agent-based modeling are appropriate methods for a new research program that substantiates our complex systems perspective on ideology. ; peerReviewed ; publishedVersion

We propose a complex systems approach to the study of political belief systems, to overcome some of the fragmentation in the current scholarship on ideology. We review relevant work in psychology, sociology, and political science and identify major cleavages in the literature: the spatial vs. non-spatial divide (ideologies as reducible to a spatially organized set of dimensions vs. as complex conceptual structures) and the person-group problem (ideologies as driven by psychological needs of individuals vs. by institutional and power structures of society). We argue that construing ideologies as conceptual networks of cognitive-affective representations embedded in social networks of people may provide a path for bridging these existing gaps and epistemological disputes. Tools from cognitive science and computational social science such as cognitive-affective mapping, connectionist simulations, and agent-based modeling are appropriate methods for a new research program that substantiates our complex systems perspective on ideology.