Racial Attitudes in Young White Children: A Methodological Analysis

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Two new racial attitude indexes were compared to a traditional, forcedchoice method of attitude assessment, by studying 82 white kindergarten children (38 males, 44 females) from a semirural school district in southeastern Michigan. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of three groups. Group 1 was presented with storyquestions containing positive and negative evaluative adjectives, and responded by choosing either a black or a white doll; children in Group 2 chose an unimposed number of dolls from a group of five black and five white dolls in response to similar storyquestions. Group 3 subjects were administered a structured, open-ended interview in order to evaluate the way these children actively described racial stimuli. Results indicated that as permitted response latitude varied from that involved in the conventional, forced-choice technique (Group 1), through the multiple-alternative method (Group 2), to the open-ended interview (Group 3), increasingly less evidence was found for the existence of pejorative, exceptionless racial stereotypes. The different structural representations of racial attitudes revealed by the three techniques were discussed.

This publication has 8 references indexed in Scilit: