Race and Kinship : Children's Categorization Processes / Cynthia Hudley, David Wakefield and Whitney Scott.

Public schooling provides an opportunity for children of various races to interact more closely. School experience can create a consistent level of cross-racial contact that may not be duplicated in other social settings. However, cross-racial contacts in schools are not always positive. Research suggests that children may differ in their racial understanding as a function of their experience with racial variability in their social environment or their racial identification. This study considers two research questions: (1) Given individual photos of people of various races, what are the decision rules children use to sort photos into family groups? and (2) How will decisions differ as a function of age, gender, and community type? African American, Latino, and European American students in the first and third grades (N=420) participated in the study. The results determined that children use skin color most often to make racial categorization decisions, although children's use of skin color for categorization declined with age. An attempt was made to describe differences in children's communities but a confounding of variables made interpretation of community effects speculative. (Contains 16 references.) (JDM)

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