Poster #173 - Do Children With Other-Race Domestic Helpers Show Less Racial Bias?

• In Event: 2-055 - Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Section - Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Context

Integrative Statement

An approach to bias reduction in intergroup literature is encouraging contact among members of different groups. Singapore provides a unique opportunity to investigate the relation between interracial contact and racial bias in a natural context. Many families in Singapore employ other-race domestic helpers from neighboring countries, who serve as secondary caregivers and engage in consistent and meaningful contact with their children. We investigated whether children with other-race helper experience held less explicit racial bias toward Javanese, a common race among domestic helpers in Singapore, than children without such experience.

Our sample consisted 100 Singaporean Chinese four- to six-year-olds. Parents completed a questionnaire on their family’s history of other-race helper employment, where they indicated whether they were currently employing helpers or had employed helpers in the past, as well as measures related to the quantity of contact between helper and child. Quantity measures included total number of helpers employed, estimated duration of helper employment in months, estimated average number of hours per day, and days per week, spent between helper and child.

Children were simultaneously presented with photos of own-race (Chinese) and other-race (Javanese) female adults, and were asked whom they would choose to take up various jobs in their social environment. There were five photo pairs, each corresponding to a normatively desirable job. Children were also presented with five photo pairs of own-race (Chinese) and other-race (Javanese) children matched to their gender, and were asked to choose whom they liked more.

Both children with and without other-race helper experience preferentially assigned desirable jobs to own-race over other-race adults on a significantly greater proportion of trials than expected by chance, p’s < .05, and liked own-race over other-race children more than expected by chance, p’s < .001. Children whose families employed helpers did not differ from children whose families never employed helpers on explicit bias favoring own-race adults, F(1, 98) = 1.41, p = .24, partial eta-squared = .01, or on explicit bias favoring own-race children, F(1, 98) = .23, p = .63, partial eta-squared = .002 (see Figure 1).

Among children with other-race helpers, duration of helper employment correlated negatively with preference for own-race adults in desirable jobs, such that children who had other-race helpers for longer periods showed lower levels of bias, r = -.52, p = .003; also, weekly hours spent between other-race helper and child correlated negatively with liking of own-race children, such that children who spent more time with helpers showed lower levels of bias, r = -.32, p = .03 (see Figure 2).

Overall, children with other-race helpers showed similar levels of other-race bias as children without other-race helpers, perhaps because although they had more contact with an other-race individual, they also saw that individual in a lower status role. Nevertheless, we found that there was a reduction in explicit bias toward the helper’s race the more time children spent with their other-race helpers, suggesting that contact with an other-race individual can still have beneficial effects on reducing explicit bias when there is extensive interaction.

Authors

• Peipei Setoh, Nanyang Technological University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kristy Jia Jin Lee, Nanyang Technological University
  Presenting Author

• Paul C Quinn, University of Delaware
  Non-Presenting Author

• Gail D Heyman, University of California, San Diego
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kang Lee, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author