Social change and racial identity: Issues in the use of picture and doll measures

Abstract

Fifty years of research has considered how children view their racial identity in response to picture and doll tests. Early American work demonstrated that young Blacks were outgroup-oriented: they identified with, and preferred, White figures. Young Whites were ingroup-oriented. One view was that young Blacks suffered in their self-esteem, and therefore turned toward White models to enhance a positive self-image. This inference played a role in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1954 to outlaw racial segregation. A major critique of the research literature (Banks, 1976) argued that the trend in Black children's results was actually random, and was an outcome of the unsatisfactory test materials used. More recently, Cross (in press) has shown that different questions were asked in studies carried out before the beginning of the Black Power Movement of the 1960s, compared with those after that period of American history: methodological change had been introduced while rapid social change was going on. Vaughan's (1978) cross-cultural research conducted throughout the decade of the 1960s, using a consistent methodology, gave a clear picture of social-change effects among young Maori children, the major ethnic minority in New Zealand. Flawed as picture and doll studies may have been in this general field of research, they constitute important evidence bearing on the question of how minority children have responded to the changing image of their group within the dominant culture.