PostDoctoral Research Fellowship

Clark Khaya D, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

This National Science Foundation Minority Postdoctoral Fellowship will generate new knowledge about patterns of children?s racial and ethnic attitudes. This project will develop and standardize an on-line racial and ethnic attitudes instrument designed for five-to-nine year olds and will assess attitudes toward Asian, Black, Latino, and White children. To date, there is a paucity of research that examines children?s attitudes across multiple racial and ethnic groups, and childhood is when racial and ethnic attitudes develop. The psychometric properties of existing racial attitude measures for children in grades K-3 are problematic, which has served to limit the theoretical understanding of racial and ethnic prejudice across disciplines. The concentrated focus on attitudes toward Black and White racial groups limits understanding of attitudes toward other racial and ethnic groups. The Fellow will perform her research at Emory University, under the sponsorship of Dr. Tyrone Forman in the Sociology Department. The research environment at Emory University provides an excellent base from which to achieve the substantive and methodological training goals proposed by the fellow. Dr. Forman?s research lies at the interface of the sociology of race and ethnic relations, children and youth, and social psychology. Specifically, he theorizes the contemporary racial terrain. In addition, Dr. Forman is conducting research on intergroup attitudes among and between people of color using new measures of racial attitudes. One fundamental limitation of existing racial attitude measures is that all of them use a two-option, forced-choice response format to measure attitudes. Respondents are forced to choose just one target (i.e., Black or White child) in response to simple positive or negative evaluative statements. The binary, forced-choice formats confound the conceptually distinct phenomena of ingroup favoritism and outgroup disparagement, which then obscures the locus of children?s racial prejudice. To remove this confound, the project will use a multi-item response format. The new response format and multidimensional modeling techniques will reveal the relationship between ingroup preference and outgroup derogation. In addition, the instrument will be able to assess other dimensions of bias, such as generalized or selective racial prejudice. The on-line attitudes instrument will use Audio Computer Assisted Self-Interviewing (A-CASI) methodology. A-CASI is cited in the literature as an innovative method to assess sensitive topics among special populations, such as children, and to improve data collection procedures. Improved measurement of racial attitudes will expand the social scientific understanding of racial prejudice across disciplines (e.g., developmental psychology and social psychology as studied by sociologists and psychologists). The training objectives are to enhance the Fellow's statistical and theoretical approaches to the study racial and ethnic attitude formation. Aside from contributing to the social scientific understanding of integroup relations among children, the postdoctoral training will help the Fellow attain a tenure-track position at a research university. Seminars and coursework in multidimensional modeling in the departments of psychology, sociology, and education will provide the fellow an opportunity to enhance her methodological skills. In addition, the fellow?s research will demonstrate the efficacy of improved racial and ethnic attitudes measurement. Without clear assessment of the foundation of children?s racial biases, school curricula, race-targeted interventions, and policies are likely to be inadequate and ineffective. In the absence of empirical study and innovative measurement techniques, the persistence of egregious racial and ethnic disparities is likely at both the interpersonal and structural levels