High School Students’ Attitudes Towards Spiders: A cross‐cultural comparison
By P. Prokop, Andrea Tolarovičová, A. M. Camerik, V. Peterková. 2010
84 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Spiders are traditionally considered to be among the least popular of animals. Current evidence suggests that a negative attitude towards spiders could be influenced by both cultural and evolutionary pressures. Some researchers suggest that science education activities could positively influence students’ perceptions of spiders. Their evidence is, however, ambivalent. Using a five‐point score Likert‐type questionnaire in which the items were developed in a similar way to four of Kellert’s categories of attitude (scientistic, negativistic, naturalistic, and ecologistic) towards invertebrates, we compared the level of knowledge of and attitudes towards spiders of high school students from two countries, Slovakia (n = 354) and South Africa (n = 382). The students represented different cultures and followed dissimilar science education curricula. Only among the Slovakian students there was a statistically significant but low correlation between knowledge and attitude (r = 0.30). The South African students scored higher in the categories of scientistic, naturalistic, and ecologistic attitudes. Comparison of attitude towards spiders of indigenous Africans from coeducational Catholic schools revealed that South African students have greater fear of spiders than Slovakian students, supporting the biological preparedness hypothesis. This hypothesis predicts a greater fear of spiders in South Africa than in Europe since several South African spiders possess venoms that are dangerous to humans. The results of this study are discussed from science education, cultural, and evolutionary perspectives.
Subfields: Genetics, Insect Science, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/516df67a003f8df62954cb16d6f0ea2490df1c8c
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Genetics
In Insect Science
In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Attitudes toward Animals among Kindergarten Children: Species Preferences (2015, result): “Invertebrates appeared in the lowest category of the hierarchical scale (Cluster B), a result in line with the general trend to view them negatively, as observed in previous studies (Kellert 1993b; Woods 2000; Bjerke and Ostdahl 2004; Prokop et al. 2010).”
- An Exploratory Study of Domestic Violence: Perpetrators’ Reports of Violence Against Animals (2018, unknown): “The urban classes in our study were racially and culturally diverse compared with the suburban classes, which may explain some differences, as found in previous studies (Prokop et al., 2010).”