NARRATION TO PROMOTE RESTORATIVE ATTITUDES IN ADOLESCENTS

According to recent studies (Lodi et al., 2021), using a restorative approach in educational contexts is useful to efficiently solve problematic situations at school as well as to promote prosocial behaviours among young people. However, developing restorative attitudes is a slow and complex process that requires to develop the ability to adopt a probabilistic and multicausal representation (Nicolini, 2023) of the reality. In fact, according to the balanced model of restorative justice (Chapman, 2012), the damage that is the result of a crime involves not only the person victim, but also the responsible of the situation as well as the overall community in which the situation has been developed. Consistently with this assumption, the present study has the aim to develop a complex and a restorative attitude into adolescents. Specifically, it was hypothesized that the involvement in a narrative activity in which they assume in turn the prospective of a person victim, of a person author of a crime and/or of the community, can be useful to improve their restorative attitudes. Participants were 44 adolescents (24 girls and 20 boys) attending high school (Mage = 17.58; SD = .53). They took part to an event at the University lasting one morning. First, they were told a story about a car accident. Then they completed a questionnaire (T0) about anagraphic information and their restorative attitudes (Taylor & Bailey, 2022), a multicomponent tool with subscales about empathic understanding, harm and needs, restoration processes, accountability, community engagement. Soon after they were divided into groups to discuss about the episode based on the point of view of people victims or responsible of the car accident, familiars, friends, media. Each participant takes part to two different groups, adopting two different roles. At the end, they completed again the same questionnaire (T1) used at the beginning of the activity, collecting data about the empathic understanding, harm and needs, restoration processes, accountability, and community engagement. Descriptive and t-test analyses were performed. Statistical analyses showed that participants indicate an improvement of their restorative attitudes in term of empathic understanding, t(43) = -3.81; p = .000, harm and needs, t(43) = -4.09; p = .000, restoration processes, t(43) = -4.01; p = .000, accountability, t(43) = 2.31; p = .026, but not community engagement, t(43) = -1.66; p = .103. In conclusion, the results suggested that is possible to promote a restorative attitude among adolescents, despite more actions are needed to promote also a community engagement approach. Strengths, limits and future directions of the study will be discussed.