The Impact of Social Class Representation on Children’s Race-Class Associations and Perceptions of Socioeconomic Mobility

• In Event: Children’s Beliefs about Social-Class and Mobility: Implications for Socioemotional Development, Stereotype Formation, and Academic Motivation

Abstract

Children form associations between race and socioeconomic status (SES) early in development (Olson et al., 2012; Shutts et al., 2016). Similar to adults (e,g., Brown-Iannuzzi et al., 2019), children stereotype Black people as poor, and White people as wealthy. Notably, the strength of these associations appears to diminish when including a third (middle-class) option (Elenbaas & Killen, 2016). However, no work has directly compared how children’s race-class association may shift when thinking of SES as dichotomous vs. slightly more continuous. Additionally, how children’s representations of race-class association might be related to their beliefs regarding a person’s socioeconomic mobility is entirely unknown. It may be that dichotomizing SES decreases perceptions of mobility, whereas adopting a more continuous representation may increase perceptions of mobility.

To test these hypotheses, we recruited 85 children (62% girls; 44% White, 31% Black, 15% Multiracial). Average age was 6 years old (M age = 6.36 years, Range = 2-14 years old). Median household income was $47,000 (SD = $24,000). Participants were randomized across two conditions. In the first condition, participants were presented with images of two houses, one of which represented living in the poverty, and one which represented wealth (Figure 2). In the second condition, participants were also presented with a third house that represented middle-class status. The participants were then shown a series of 24 images of children (6 each for White, Black, Asian, and Latinx, half female-presenting and half male-presenting). The participants were asked to select which house they believed the child lived in based on these images. After placing all the images in a house, participants were then asked which house they believed the children in the poor and rich houses would live in when they grew up.

A logistic regression predicting the likelihood of placement in the rich vs. poor house as a function of experimental condition and target race revealed a significant interaction, B = -.93, p< .001. Planned contrasts probed this interaction by each target race category. Compared to the dichotomous SES condition, participants in the more continuous condition were more likely to believe that Black children would live in the rich house, B = -.52, p = .05, and marginally less likely to believe White children would live in the rich house, B = .55, p = .06 (Figure 3). SES representation condition had no effect on children’s perceptions of SES mobility. Correlation analyses, however, indicated that older participants were more likely to believe children in the rich house would remain wealthy, r = .24 p< .05, suggesting potential age-related changes in SES mobility beliefs.

We discuss these findings in the context of which factors (both internal and external to experimental manipulation) might shape children’s beliefs about SES. This work may provide preliminary evidence that education explaining the socioeconomic spectrum, in contrast to a poor/rich dichotomy, may disrupt stereotypes that children develop regarding connections between SES and a person’s race. This programming could be particularly effective in middle childhood as children may develop stronger socioeconomic mobility beliefs with age.

Authors

• Lauren Philbrook, Colgate University
  Presenting Author

• Ryan Lei, Haverford College
  Non-Presenting Author

• William Cipolli, Colgate University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rachel Spitzer, Haverford College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jazmin L. Brown-Iannuzzi, University of Virginia
  Non-Presenting Author

• Erin Cooley, Colgate College
  Non-Presenting Author