Measuring 5-year-old Mexican-heritage Children's Ethnic-Racial Identity Attitudes, Centrality, and Knowledge

Abstract

Young children are aware of ethnicity-race, yet the field lacks measures to assess ethnic-racial identity (ERI) in early childhood. Thus, the goals of the current study were: (a) to describe three adapted measures that can be used to assess aspects of Mexican-heritage children's ERI (i.e., attitudes, centrality, and knowledge), and (b) to test the psychometric properties of each measure among 182 five-year-old Mexican-heritage children. Results from confirmatory factor analyses supported a 2-factor solution characterizing positive and negative ERI attitudes; the subscales demonstrated adequate reliability and findings provided preliminary support for construct validity. Findings for ERI centrality revealed significant variability among children and initial support for convergent and divergent validity. Support for ERI knowledge was more limited and suggests further development of this measure is needed. Overall, the current study calls attention to the importance of assessing ERI in early childhood, and provides developmentally appropriate assessments to stimulate growth in this area.

Keywords: attitudes; centrality; early childhood; ethnic-racial/ethnic/racial identity; knowledge.

Figure 1.

The five boy dolls that were shown to boys and the five girl dolls that were shown to girls in the ethnic-racial identity attitudes measure.

Figure 2.

The five social category options from which children could select in the ethnic-racial identity centrality measure, which included (a) Son/Daughter, (b) Five-Year-Old, (c) Friend, (d) Boy/Girl, and (e) Mexican. Note. Boys were shown the top row that featured boys in these roles, and girls were shown the bottom row that featured girls in these roles. For the Mexican category, there were five different cards for each gender that featured one of the five dolls that children were shown in the beginning of the tasks. Children were only shown the card for the Mexican category that featured the doll that matched the Mexican doll that they selected as Mexican at the beginning of the task.

Figure 3.

Response options for one of the questions in the ethnic-racial knowledge measure. Children were asked: “What do you think Mexican children do when they say ‘Hi’ to someone?” Children selected one of the three response cards: “kiss on the cheek,” “shake hands,” or “kiss on the cheek and shake hands.”