A Systematic Review of Modern Measures for Capturing Children’s Ethnic and Racial Biases

• In Event: Understanding and Responding to Bias from Childhood to Adulthood

Abstract

In recent years, there have been tremendous efforts among developmental scientists to understand the nature of children’s ethnic and racial biases and to identify strategies that could reduce biases among children (Aboud et al., 2012; Raabe & Beelmann, 2011). Such efforts are crucial for mitigating negative impacts of discrimination on children from minoritized groups and for building more inclusive environments (Marcelo & Yates, 2018; Umaña-Taylor, 2016).

Measures of children’s ethnic and racial biases are important tools for studying the development of biases and for assessing the impact of bias-reducing strategies. Yet, the field lacks a systematic analysis of how biases are being measured, let alone consensus about how they should be measured. In order to spark conversation about measuring children’s biases and try to assist researchers in the selection and implementation of measures, we conducted a systematic review of measures of children’s ethnic and racial biases. Our goal was to answer two questions: How are researchers assessing children’s biases? What is the quality of measures in the field’s toolkit?

We conducted a search on PsycInfo to identify peer-reviewed journal articles that might contain measures of children’s ethnic and racial biases from 2010 through 2021. Our search yielded over 9,000 articles, many of which were not relevant to our project (e.g., papers about racial bias among medical professionals). To be included for further coding, articles had to focus on child participants and report on a quantitative measure of ethnic bias, racial bias, or anti-racism. We identified 394 articles with at least one relevant measure, and coded each measure for several properties, including data collection location, psychometric information, and type of construct under study.

Our coding reveals the following: First, reports of children’s ethnic and racial biases come predominantly from the U.S. and from Western European countries, and in many cases, authors provide little evidence (directly or via citations of previous work) of their chosen measure’s reliability, validity, or responsiveness. Thus, it is difficult to make clear recommendations about which measures researchers should be using to study children’s ethnic and racial biases, especially in societies that are underrepresented in the literature. Second, there is paucity of measures that directly capture children’s behavior, especially their behavior toward real people; most bias measures probe children’s evaluations of ethnic and racial groups using images and imagined scenarios. Third, the field’s toolkit includes few measures focused on anti-racism—especially among measures for young children. We know relatively little about young children’s capacity and motivation to notice, confront, and rectify ethnic and racial discrimination, let alone how best to reliably measure those constructs. Notable and instructive exceptions to all three general conclusions from the review will be highlighted in the presentation.

Our review provides a critical first step toward more careful evaluations and evidence-based selection of measures, which we hope will spur further research and measure development. The presentation will end with a series of recommendations for the field regarding best practices in measuring and reporting on children’s ethnic and racial biases.

Authors

• Eren Fukuda, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author

• Katharine Scott, Northwestern University

• Katherine Lynn Swerbenski, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Nicole Huth, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Kierin Barnett, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Maddy Henkel, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Natalie Sarmiento, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Kristin Shutts, University of Wisconsin - Madison