Social Representations and Social Identity in Swedish Folk High Schools: an application of Duveen and Lloyd

This article extends Duveen’s work on social representations and social gender identity by discussing how it can be applied to the context of Swedish folk high school participants’ social representations of folk high school and university, then examines the influence of these representations on participants’ desires and ambitions to progress to university. Adopting Duveen’s framework to analyze several previous data regarding folk high schools (i.e., a document study of folk high school teachers’ magazines, an association study on folk high school participants, and interviews with folk high school participants), I seek to illustrate in this article how most premises concerning the formation of children’s social identity (as described by Duveen) also hold for adults entering a new social context.