Prejudice in Middle Childhood

Summary

Some cognitive and social aspects of prejudice in Australian children were explored. Developmental egocentricity, neglected in previous studies with children, was an important factor. A questionnaire, appropriate to the concrete stage of development and requiring a paper-and-pencil response was developed after extensive interviews with children in middle childhood. After pilot testing it was administered to a random sample of 2,279 children, aged 9-13 years, in metropolitan Sydney representing 57 different ethnic groups. Reliability in the retest was good (r = .96) and the results suggest discriminative validity in that, consistent with research in other countries, the children from less educated environments gave significantly more prejudiced responses on the measure. Correlations between scores of the authoritarian scale for middle childhood and scores of prejudice on the questionnaire were also high. Cognitive factors, interaction between children of different ethnic groups and prejudice among ethnic minorities are examined and discussed.