Poster #81 - Peer and Parental Expectations Regarding Cross-Race Social Inclusion in non-School Contexts

• In Event: Poster Session 13

Abstract

While cross-race friendships has been theorized to help reduce bias and increase social belonging, cross-race friendships decline with age (Tropp & Pettigrew, 2005). Most research on cross-race friendships has focused on child nominations of friendships at school in a context where opportunities for cross-race contact often exist. Less research has been conducted on children’s expectations about cross-race friendships in more intimate contexts outside of school where social exclusion may be more pervasive, such as attending a movie night or a sleepover party. Exclusion from non-school contexts can contribute to both social segregation as well as a lack of opportunity for intimacy, which is a form of highly salient and positive intergroup contact (Killen et al., 2022).Very little research has studied children’s expectations of parental and peer approval for cross-race friendships in contexts involving social intimacy outside of the school context. The current study filled this gap.
The sample was comprised of 219 children between 6 and 12 years (MAge = 9.18 years, SDAge = 1.901; 51.1% female) recruited from the United States. The participant sample consisted of Black children (n = 67; MAge = 9.47 years, SDAge = 1.94) and White children (n = 152; MAge = 9.05 years, SDAge = 1.88). Participants completed a 30-minute interview where they were presented a vignette about characters organizing two different non-school intimate contexts, an outdoor movie night and a sleepover party.
In both intimate contexts, participants were asked to predict who they thought peers and parents would choose to join the peer group, and who they themselves would choose to join using a forced choice question where participants could choose to include a same-race or cross-race peer. Participants were also asked to evaluate how okay or not okay it was for a White target child and a Black target child to include a same-race peer for each of following four reasons (based on the highest frequency of reasoning responses during pilot testing): 1) parental preference, 2) peer preference, 3) racial in-group similarity and 4) racial outgroup dislike.
In the sleepover intimacy context, participants chose to personally include a cross-race peer significantly more than they expected peers to do so, F(1, 211) = 5.82, p = .017, or parents to do so, F(1, 209) = 4.52, p = .035 (see Figure 1). In the movie night intimacy context, participants also chose to personally include a cross-race peer significantly more than they expected peers to do so, F(1, 211) = 7.23, p = .008, or parents to do so, F(1, 209) = 5.68, p = .018. Additionally, younger participants (6 - 9.5 years) evaluated same-race inclusion more positively than older participants (9.5 - 12 years) for both the White and Black target child for all the previously stated reasoning categories (see Table 1).
Thus, children view themselves as being more supportive of interracial inclusion than parents and peers for two types of non-school intimate peer settings. With age, children view same-race inclusion increasingly negatively. These results have important implications for promoting childhood cross-race inclusion.

Authors

• Katherine Verity Luken Raz, University of Maryland - College Park
  Presenting Author

• Melanie A. Killen, University of Maryland - College Park

• Natalie Bartholet, University of Maryland - College Park

• Ricardo Calvo, University of Maryland - College Park

• Ameya Sriram, University of Maryland- College Park

• Nastassja Stephens