Do children construct or discover ethnicity? Insights from a west London primary school Dr Ruth Woods Canterbury Christ Church University [email protected].

Do children construct or discover ethnicity? Insights

from a west London primary school

Dr Ruth WoodsCanterbury Christ Church

[email protected]

Outline

• Introduction to ethnic constancy– Is ethnicity fixed or mutable?

• This study– Method & findings

• A closer look

• Conclusions

1. Introduction

Ethnic constancy

• ‘the understanding that ethnic group membership is immutable and… does not change with age’ (Nesdale, 2004, p.230)

• Based on gender constancy (Kohlberg, 1966)

• Emerges 7-9 years (Ruble et al., 2004)

• Identity: Knowledge of own and others’ ethnicities

• Stability: Constancy over time

• Consistency: Constancy over settings & physical transformations

Examples of previous research: Aboud (1984)

• Child views photos of Italian Canadian boy dressing up in Native Indian Canadian clothing

• ‘What is this child—an Italian or an Indian?’

• ‘What makes an Italian Canadian be an Italian Canadian?’ ‘What makes a Native Indian be a Native Indian?’

• ‘Can an Italian change his parents and grandparents to make them Indian?’

Examples of previous research: Bernal et al. (1990), Ocampo et al. (1997)• Mexican American children

• Ethnic stability: ‘When you become a grown up person, will you be Mexican?’

• Ethnic consistency: ‘If you changed your hair colour to blonde, would you be Mexican?’

Is ethnicity constant?EC researchers

• Ethnicity is about origins

• Children on universal pathway towards this knowledge

• Children ‘realize that their ethnic characteristics are permanent’ (Bernal et al., 1990, p.5)

Sociology & anthropology

• Ethnicity as socially constructed (Jenkins, 1997; Song, 2003)

• Origins only important if people make them so

• Eriksen’s (2002) ‘myths of common origin’ (p.13)

2. This study

Research site

• Large multicultural primary school, West London– Approx 30% Indian, 14% English,

14% Somali, 7% Pakistani, 35% 30 other ethnicities

• 92 (of 270) children interviewed– 45% Indian, 16% English, 7%

Somali, 7% Pakistani, 27% other– Years 2 (mean 7 years 4 months), 4

(mean 9 years 4 months), 6 (mean 11 years 4 months)

Questions• Identity

– Can you think of someone in your year who is: English; Indian; Somali?

– Are you English, Indian, Somali or something else?

• Stability– When you grow up, will you be Indian or something

else?– Could you change into an English person if you

wanted to?– Past, future, self and other

• Consistency– A Somali girl [who lives round here] is thinking of

putting on some Indian clothes. If she did that, would she still be Somali or would she become Indian do you think?

– Clothes, food, skin colour, language, religion, marriage

– Somali—Indian, Indian—English

0

20

40

60

80

100Id

enti

ty s

core

%

2 4 6

Year group

Identity

(F2,84 = 2.468, p=.091)

0

20

40

60

80

100S

tab

ility

sco

re %

2 4 6

year group

Stability

(F2,70 = 2.704, p=.074)

Stability of own ethnicity Stability of other person’s ethnicity

Stability of ethnicity in past Stability of ethnicity in future

(F2,70 = 3.741, p=.029)

(F2,70 = 4.777, p=.011)

0

20

40

60

80

100C

onsi

sten

cy s

core

2 4 6

Year group

Consistency

(X2=8.205, df = 2, p = .017)

3. A closer look

ConsistencyStabilityIdentity

0

20

40

60

80

100C

on

sist

ency

sco

re

Changeclothes

Learnlanguage

Changeskin colour

Eatdifferent

food

Changereligion

Inter-ethnicmarriage

year 2

year 4

year 6

Consistency scores on different transformations

(F3.468, 315.561 = 61.419, p < 0.001)

Why clothing, language, skin colour & food can’t change ethnicity

• Clothes: ‘It doesn't really matter if you change because some people, I see some people that are English and they wear Indian clothes and they don't change and it's not natural to change.’ (Indian girl, 9 years 3 months)

• Language: ‘She still knows English and um she can't just change just because she learned something of being Indian, she has to become like go to church, believe in one God, things like that.’ (mixed race girl, 7 years 4 months)

• Skin colour: ‘I think she would still be Somalian but cos she could like say she could still pray to her God and it doesn't matter if she's er white, brown or black, it doesn't matter, um she could be she could still be Somalian.’ (English girl, 11 years 9 months)

• Food: ‘Nothing you eat will affect your religion.’ (Arab boy, 11 years 6 months)

Why religion does matter• ‘You just told me that somebody wants to change

religion, so if they want to change their religion they'll be a different religion.’ (Indian girl, 7 years 6 months)

• ‘Because yeah, you change your religion, if you're English yeah and you change your religion obviously you're gonna change into a different religion.’ (Pakistani boy, 9 years 4 months)

• ‘He changed his religion and um I’m Christian, if I changed my religion to like Muslim now I'll have to be like Somalian.’ (Black African boy, 11 years 1 month)

• ‘If you change your religion and you was going to be like say if I changed from English to Muslim then I wouldn't be English anymore because I'll be doing Muslim things.’ (English girl, 11 years 5 months)

Religion & ethnic constancy• ‘An English (/ Indian / Somali) boy

is thinking of changing his religion. If he did that, would he still be English or would he become Indian?’

• A nonsensical question?

• Indian, English, Somali as religions?– Ethnographic evidence

• Shared reference does not imply shared meaning

Religion & ethnic constancy• Children asked to name 4 religions

• 30% error rate

• No relationship between errors in naming religions and children’s answers to religion consistency questions (r = -.04, n = 80, p = .352, 1-tailed)

• So Indian, English, Somali are connected with religions (rather than being religions)

Stability

• Stability scores decrease with age

• Most 6-7 year olds: a person can’t change in future

• Most 10-11 year olds: a person can change into at least one other ethnicity

Why a person cannot change

• ‘She was born to be an Indian’ (Indian girl, 6 years 10 months)

• ‘You can't change cos like it's, if you're born yeah, you don't normally change what you already are because her mum and dad, they were Indian, they were born and they never changed and that's I think, cos everybody doesn't change.’ (Indian girl, 9 years 3 months)

• ‘Cos I think that some parents are strict with their children and I think they might not wanna talk to them or not really get in contact with him if he changed his religion because I don't think the whole family would change with him’ (Indian boy, 9 years 7 months)

• ‘Cos, cos she's always been English and like you can't change yourself, no yeah you just can't change yourself. You can change your religion and language and stuff but you'll always be English.’ (English girl, 11 years 9 months)

Why a person can change

• ‘It's up to her what she wants to be, and we can't force her to be something that she doesn't want to be.’ (mixed race girl, 7 years 4 months)

• ‘It’s her choice.’ (Kosovan girl, 9 years 6 months)

• ‘Because if she didn't want to be English and she wants to change her religion she might n-, she might just wanna have a change, a new change of lifestyle.’ (English girl, 11 years 9 months )

• ‘I could be British then change into Somalian by my religion, and then um change into um Indian by like going to India and stay there for like for some years and then I'll be Indian, and then that’s how people can change.’ (African Caribbean boy, 11 years 1 month )

Stability & freedom of choice• Teachers talked about choice

– ‘Behaviour choices’– Choosing own religion

• Are the children applying this rhetoric to ethnicity?

• Ethnic mutability, not constancy

Identity: Leah’s story

• 9 years, 9 months

• Ethnicity: ‘Other mixed background’

• ‘My mum's dad is Indian and my mum's mum is like Burmese Chinese and Malays sort of mixed there but and my dad is just like sort of English.’

RW: And how about you, are you Indian or Somalian or English or something else?

Leah: See this is gonna be a hard question. It's like for me cos I'm part Indian and part Chinese and Malay, and half English so it's like hard.

RW: Oh wow, ok. So you’ve got a very, interesting one.Leah: Yeah.RW: Is any of those parts of you feel stronger than other

parts do you think? Or would you like, do you feel that they’re all kind of equally important?

Leah: Um, I'll say because English because I can speak full English, I'll say that's stronger than, than Malay part of me and the Chinese part of me because I'm just learning how to speak Malay by this [RW: Oh are you?] um book and er CD ROM where you put in the computer so.

RW: Oh great, good for you. And what about you said there’s an Indian part of you as well.

Leah: Oh yeah the Indian part of me, the English is the strongest then I'll say it's the Indian then Malay then Chinese because Indian I've, I like to like listen to the music and like, I like watching Indian films and looking at the subtitles so I sort of know what's going on.

Identity: Leah’s story

• Defines her ethnicity with reference to origins

• But recognises limitations

• And ranks her ethnicities with reference to social context & behaviours

‘I don't have any Somalian people in my family even if you go back in generations and I don't think she would as well unless her like great great someone was Somalian as well. Even I'm not sure if my great great grandfather is Somalian.’

4. Conclusions

Ethnic constancy

• Children constructing ethnicity as mutable– Consistency: religion questions– Stability: freedom of choice– Construction of multiple ethnic identity

• Challenge to EC data and theory• Support for constructionist theories of

ethnicity• Further research of secondary school

years needed

What anthropology & sociology can do for developmental psychology

• Questioning researchers’ assumptions– Ethnicity as inevitably fixed– Difference as error– S&A: encourage questioning of own

assumptions

• Supplementing researchers’ analyses– Quantitative analysis of closed questions– S&A: Interviews & participant

observation

What developmental psychology can do for anthropology & sociology

• Sociology / anthropology: focus on either adult or child

• Developmental psychology: How children become adults

• How do people arrive at the concepts, identities & ways of relating to others that they take for granted as adults (Toren, 1999)?