Do children construct or discover ethnicity? Insights from a west London
primary school
Dr Ruth Woods, senior lecturer in psychology
Department of Applied Social Sciences, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK
ruth.woods@canterbury.ac.uk
Paper presented at University of Surrey CRONEM seminar series
19th November 2007
Abstract
Developmental psychologists see ethnicity as an immutable property of the person based on
ancestry, a property they call ethnic constancy (Nesdale, 2004). They therefore conceive of
children’s learning as a universal pathway culminating in the discovery of ethnicity’s
immutability. In contrast, most sociologists and anthropologists view ethnicity as socially
produced and thus open to being constructed differently by different groups, or generations, of
people (Eriksen, 1993; Levine, 1999; Song, 2003). From this perspective, children do not
inevitably come to realise that ethnicity is fixed, and may in certain circumstances construct a
conception of ethnicity as mutable. My presentation combines conventional psychological
measures of ethnic constancy with interview and ethnographic data in order to explore the
emerging ideas about ethnicity held by children attending a multicultural primary school in west
London. I will argue that while data gained by conventional measures seem at first sight to
support the psychological approach, closer examination of those data in conjunction with richer
qualitative material suggests that the children are constructing a complex understanding of
ethnicity which does not map onto definitions taken for granted in the psychological literature.
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1. Introduction
What is ethnic constancy and how is it measured?
Developmental psychologists define ethnic constancy as ‘the understanding that ethnic group
membership is immutable and…does not change with age’ (Nesdale 2004, p.230). The construct
is based on a particular definition of ethnicity in terms of ancestry. For example, one study in this
tradition states that ‘Like gender ethnicity is determined by birth; it cannot be changed as easily
as nationality or religion’ (Aboud, 1984, p.218). The concept is derived from a much larger body
of research investigating gender constancy, similarly defined as the understanding that gender is
fixed (Kohlberg, 1966). According to Kohlberg and others (e.g. Slaby & Frey, 1975), there are
three conceptual components of constancy: identity (ability to correctly label self and others),
stability (understanding that the property is unchanging over time) and consistency
(understanding that the property is unchanging over different settings and physical
transformations such as changing clothes). Researchers have used a range of different questions
to assess ethnic constancy, generally drawing on one or more of these three components. It is
therefore useful to explore in detail the questions used in each piece of research. In the summaries
that follow, I have used the terms employed by the researchers themselves for the ethnicities of
their participants.
Aboud and Skerry’s (1983) participants were Jewish-Canadian children. They took three photos
of each participant: one in their normal clothes, one in partial Eskimo clothing, and one in
complete Eskimo clothing (having first ensured that the children did know that the clothing was
Eskimo). Then, they asked each child, ‘What are you?’
The ethnicity of Aboud’s (1984) participants is not stated, although it is mentioned that they were
white. Each child viewed four photos of a boy and are told that he is Italian Canadian. Then four
more photos were shown, depicting the boy changing into Native Indian Canadian clothing. The
experimenter commented at this time, ‘I asked him to put on Indian clothes, so he did.’
The child was then asked a series of questions assessing ethnic constancy:
1. ‘What is this child—an Italian or an Indian?’ ‘Is he an _____ [nonmentioned label]?’
2. ‘What is this child? Is he this [pointing to one set of photos depicting one ethnicity] or
this?’ ‘Is he this?’ [pointing to rejected photos]
3. Child is asked to sort 10 photos of Italians and Indians (including photo used above, of
Italian boy dressed as Indian), into two piles on the basis of ethnicity. (It is not clear from
the article whether the word ‘ethnicity’ is used with the child.)
4. ‘Are these pictures (indicate 1st and last photo of boy) of the same person or of two
different people?’
5. ‘What makes an Italian Canadian be an Italian Canadian?’ ‘What makes a Native Indian
be a Native Indian?’
6. ‘Can an Italian change his parents and grandparents to make them Indian?’
Higher scores were given to children who maintained that regardless of his outfit, the boy in the
photos was Italian (questions 1 to 3), that he remained the same person (question 4), that ancestry
or parents make someone Italian Canadian or Italian Canadian (question 5) and that one’s parents
and grandparents could not change ethnicity (question 6).
Bernal, Knight, Garza, Ocampo & Cota (1990) and Ocampo, Knight and Bernal (1997) tested
Mexican American children using questions modelled on Slaby & Frey’s (1975) classic measure
of gender constancy. They assessed ethnic stability with questions such as ‘When you become a
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grown up person, will you be Mexican?’ and ethnic consistency with questions such as ‘If you
changed your hair colour to blonde, would you be Mexican?’
Two other studies have assessed the related construct of racial constancy, defined as ‘the
irrevocability of racial classification’ (Semaj, 1980, p.60) or the point when children ‘realize a
social category [in this case, race] is not changeable’ (Rutland, Cameron, Bennett & Ferrell,
2005, p.701). Semaj (1980) questioned Black American children. Each child viewed a photo of a
black child and were asked if that child could become white (1) if (s)he really wanted to, (2) by
changing their hair (with a wig), (3) by changing the colour of their face with makeup, or (4) by
changing both hair and face. Children gained higher scores if they said the child in the photo
could not change, and if they gave appropriate reasons for this.
Finally, Rutland et al. (2005) showed Anglo-British children photos of four same-gender
children, one Anglo-British, one African-Caribbean, one Asian-Indian, and one Far-East Asian.
Children were asked one question for each of the three areas of constancy studied in gender
constancy research. Identity was assessed with ‘Which one are you like?’ Stability was assessed
with ‘When you grow up, which one will YOU be like?’ Finally, consistency was measured with
‘If you went on holiday to a really hot place and got a suntan and your skin turned dark, which of
these children would you REALLY be like?’ Children gained a point each time they answered a
question by pointing at the Anglo-British child.
All these studies found that like gender constancy, ethnic constancy increases with age; in other
words, the older the child, the more likely they are to assert that it is not possible to change one’s
ethnicity. Ethnic constancy seems to emerge at around the age of seven to nine years, which is
somewhat later than gender constancy (Ruble, Alvarez, Bachman, Cameron, Fuligni, Coll &
Rhee, 2004)1.
Criticisms of ethnic constancy research
Several critiques can be made of this body of research. First, researchers have assessed ethnic
constancy using different methodologies (an issue with gender constancy research also;
Szkrybalo & Ruble, 1999). Second, they have not explored whether children differentiate in their
judgements of the possibility of themselves changing ethnicity compared with the possibility of
another person changing. Third, researchers have often specified the means of transformation in
their questions. For example, Aboud and Skerry (1983) only ask children about whether clothing
can change one’s ethnicity. Children may think that other unmentioned mechanisms of change
are more efficacious. For example, a child might believe that ethnicity cannot be altered by
changing clothing, but that it can be altered by changing religion or lifestyle. Such a child would
appear to have achieved ethnic constancy on Aboudn and Skerry’s measure. These critiques were
all addressed in the current study. But the most fundamental criticism is that researchers have
assumed that they know what ethnicity is, and therefore what the endpoint of children’s
developing ideas about ethnicity must be. It is this issue which I wish to address in this paper.
The researchers described above see the constancy of ethnicity as a truth to be acquired by
children the world over. This assumption is apparent in the wording used by researchers, for
example asserting that the child ‘eventually recognizes the irrevocability of racial classification’
(Semaj, 1980, p.60), gains the ‘knowledge that one’s group membership is permanent and
1
Although some previous studies have found quite high constancy scores among even 5-year-olds (Rutland et al.,
2005), with 9- and 10-year-olds performing at ceiling (Bernal et al., 1990), others have also found relatively low
levels of constancy even in older children. For example, Aboud and Skerry (1983) found that only 40% of 8-yearolds had achieved ethnic constancy, while mean racial constancy scores in Semaj’s research were modest: 47% for 8
to 9-year-olds and 62% for 10 to 11-year-olds. These latter studies suggest that many children of 9 or 10 years do not
see ethnicity as fixed. Nevertheless, they do not show the reduction with age of some constancy scores reported here.
3
unchanging’ (Ocampo et al., 1997, p.480), and ‘realize[s] that their ethnic characteristics are
permanent’ (Bernal et al., 1990, p.5). The words ‘recognize’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘realize’ indicate
that developmental psychologists see ethnic constancy as a fact of life which children must grasp.
The implicit claim being made is that the researchers themselves know the truth about ethnicity
(that it is immutable), and are interested in when children come to recognise this truth.
According to sociologists and anthropologists, however, this is not the only way of
conceptualising ethnicity. They contrast two very different approaches, termed primordial and
situational (Levine, 1999; Song, 2003). According to Song (2003), primordialists see ethnicity as
a natural categorisation based on shared heritage and blood ties, fixed at birth and not actively
chosen, while situationalists see ethnicity as a socially constructed category, in which origins are
only important insofar as people make them so. Contemporary sociologists and anthropologists
tend to prefer the situationalist view for purposes of analysis, in which ideas of shared heritage
and blood ties are conceived as being constructed by people, rather than as pre-existing objective
analytic categories. For example, social anthropologist Thomas Eriksen (2002) defines ethnicity
as ‘a social identity (based on a contrast vis-à-vis others) characterised by metaphoric or fictive
kinship’ and usually incorporating ‘myths of common origin’ (p.13). Thus, many sociologists and
anthropologists are open to seeing ethnicity as potentially mutable, if this is how the people under
study define it (Jenkins, 1997; Song, 2003).
Recently some psychologists have put forward similar views on race and ethnicity (including
Frances Aboud, one of the authors of the ethnic constancy work described above). For example,
upon noting that racial categories cannot be justified on the biological or genetic level, Quintana,
Aboud, Chao, Contreras-Grau, Cross, Hudley, Hughes, Liben, Nelson-Le Gall & Vietze (2006,
p.1131) argue that ‘race instead refers to its socially constructed meaning in which differences
between racial groups [are] perceived to be immutable because of the belief that racial differences
are based on genetic and biological characteristics.’ Hitlin, Brown and Elder (2006) provide
empirical support for this argument. They show that the majority of young multiracial Americans
change their self-declared racial identities over time, indicating that for these adolescents, race is
fluid rather than fixed. Hitlin et al. (2006) thus criticise the view that racial identity is fixed,
arguing instead that ethnicity and race are fluid, negotiated and socially constructed (p.1299).
If the sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists just mentioned are right, that people
construct ethnicity rather than discover it, then it is plausible that some children may not be on
the pathway to ethnic constancy at all, but rather on a journey toward constructing ethnicity as a
mutable property of the person. For example, if children learn to define ethnicity with reference
to origins (as most developmental psychologists seem to), they are likely to subscribe to ethnic
constancy. If however they learn to define ethnicity with reference to one’s lifestyle or religion,
then they may come to see ethnicity as a mutable property of the person.
Thus far, ethnic constancy research seems to support the psychologists’ view, in that all studies
have found higher levels of constancy among older than younger children. In this presentation, I
examine my own data in detail in order to establish which approach it best supports.
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2. This study
This study differs from previous studies in that it solicited children’s reasons for their answers
and examined these qualitatively rather than simply converting them into a numerical score. It
also included questions on a broad range of transformations, based on an earlier study carried out
in the school (see Woods, 2007). In addition, it draws on ethnographic data collected at the
school to help interpret the findings.
Method
Participants
The research reported here is a follow up study building on my PhD research (Woods, 2005), and
conducted at the same fieldsite: a large multicultural primary school near Southall in west
London, called Woodwell Green. In total, 270 children were invited to take part (90 children in
year 2, 88 children in year 4, and 92 children in year 6). Only those 92 children who received
parental consent, gave consent themselves, and who were present during the interview period,
were interviewed. These were 14 boys and 16 girls in year 2 (mean age 7 years, 4 months), 9
boys and 20 girls in year 4 (mean age 9 years, 4 months) and 14 boys and 19 girls in year 6 (mean
age 11 years, 4 months). 45% of the children had Indian ethnicity according to school records,
16% had English ethnicity, 7% Somali, 7% Pakistani, 2% had refused to declare their ethnicity
for school records, and the remaining 25% represented a range of other ethnicities, including
Arab, Nepali, Black African, and a number of ‘mixed backgrounds’. Proportions in the school
overall were described by the head teacher as around 30% Indian, 14% English, 14% Somali, 7%
Pakistani, and the remainder drawn from around thirty other ethnic groups. Therefore children of
Indian ethnicity were somewhat over-represented in this study, and children of Somali ethnicity
somewhat under-represented.
Measures
All children were asked questions pertaining to ethnic identity, stability and consistency. The
order of the questions was counter-balanced across four versions of the interview schedule. The
ethnicities mentioned in the consistency questions were also counterbalanced. For example, half
of the children were asked whether an Indian child could become English, and half whether an
English child could become Indian. Children heard questions about children of their own gender.
All interviews were recorded and transcribed in full. Children received a point each time they
answered a question with a ‘constancy’ response. For example, a Somali child who claimed that
s/he could not change to be Indian scored 1 point for that response, while a child who maintained
that s/he could change, that s/he did not know, or that s/he would be half of the original ethnicity
and half of the new one, received 0. Children were also asked to explain their answers. Their
explanations were not scored, but were used to interpret the quantitative findings.
Measure of identity (score out of 4)
Can you think of someone in your year who is: English; Indian; Somali?
Are you English, Indian, Somali or something else?
Measure of stability (score out of 12)
[About an imagined local child with same ethnicity as participant]
When s/he was a baby, was s/he [child’s ethnicity] or something else?
Was s/he ever (2 of:) English / Indian / Somali do you think?
When s/he grows up, will s/he be [child’s ethnicity] or something else?
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Could s/he change into an (2 of:) English / Indian / Somali person if s/he wanted to?
When you were a baby, were you [child’s ethnicity] or something else?
Were you ever (2 of:) English / Indian / Somali do you think?
When you grow up, will you be [child’s ethnicity] or something else?
Could you change into an (2 of:) English / Indian / Somali person if you wanted to?
Measure of consistency (score out of 12)
[About imagined local children each of whom is thinking of doing something different]
a)
b)
c)
d)
e)
f)
One English boy is thinking of putting on some Indian clothes.
Another English boy is thinking of learning to speak an Indian language.
Another English boy is thinking of painting his skin a different colour.
Another English boy is thinking of eating some Indian food.
Another English boy is thinking of changing his religion.
Another English boy is thinking of marrying someone who is Indian when he grows up.
After each: If he did that, would he still be English or would he become Indian?
These questions are then repeated, but this time involving Indian boys doing ‘Somali’ activities.
Measures of understanding of key terms (score out of 4 for each of religions, countries,
languages)
Can you tell me the names of four different:
a) religions
b) countries
c) languages
Results
Numbers of participants vary across tests because in some cases children’s scores for specific
component could not be calculated. For example, in the identity test, some children named a peer
whose ethnicity was not available on school records, while in the stability test, some children’s
self-identified ethnicity was different to that appearing on school records, making it impossible to
score them on stability.
Initial analyses revealed no main effects for version, gender, or ethnicity in question (in the case
of the consistency questions) so these were collapsed for all subsequent analyses.
Identity: There was a marginally significant main effect of age on identity score (F2,84 = 2.468,
p=.091). Consistent with previous research, older children gained higher identity scores than
younger children did (see table 1).
Stability: There was a marginally significant main effect of age on stability score (F2,70 = 2.704,
p=.074). However, older children gained lower stability scores than younger children did (see
table 1). Four one-way ANOVAS were conducted to explore this finding further. In each case,
the independent variable remained year group. The overall stability score was broken down into
four dependent variables: stability of child’s own ethnicity, stability of another person’s ethnicity,
stability of ethnicity in the past, and stability of ethnicity in the future. Older children scored
significantly lower than younger children only on stability of other’s ethnicity (F2,70 = 3.741,
6
p=.029) and stability of ethnicity in the future (F2,70 = 4.777, p=.011). There were no significant
differences between age groups on stability of child’s own ethnicity nor of stability of ethnicity in
the past.
Consistency: The variances of the consistency scores across the three age groups were
significantly different from one another so a non-parametric Kruskall-Wallis test was used. There
was a significant main effect of age (X2=8.205, df = 2, p = .017). Older children tended to score
higher on consistency than younger children (see table 1).
Table 1. Children’s constancy scores by age
Means and (standard deviations)
Identity (/4)
Stability (/12)
Consistency (/12)
Mean (& SD)
Year group
2
3.05 (.92)
4
3.07 (.92)
6
3.47 (.54)
N
28
29
30
Mean (& SD)
9.50 (2.66)
8.18 (2.79)
7.84 (2.63)
N
26
22
25
Mean (& SD)
8.57 (3.77)
8.17 (2.14)
9.85 (1.75)
N
30
29
33
To sum up these results, children’s scores on identity and consistency show the expected increase
with age, with older children close to ceiling level. These findings are in line with other research
in the field (Aboud, 1984; Aboud & Skerry, 1983; Bernal et al., 1990; Ocampo et al., 1997;
Rutland et al., 2005; Semaj, 1980) and with developmental psychologists’ universalising claim
that as they mature, children realise that ethnicity is fixed and unchangeable (Ruble et al., 2004).
Children’s stability scores show a marginally significant trend in the opposite direction, which
runs counter to previous research and theory. This trend is only significant for questions about
another child (rather than the self) and about the future (rather than the past).
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3. A closer look
My initial glance over the data found significant age differences which are mostly in keeping
with the psychological approach, with older children more likely than younger to know their own
and others’ ethnicities, and to insist that various transformations do not alter one’s ethnicity. In
this section, I go deeper into data gathered in each of the three sections (identity, stability and
consistency) in order to argue that they do not in fact fit with psychologists’ theories of, or data
on, ethnic constancy.
Consistency scores: the relationship between ethnicity and religion
The overall consistency age trend disguises the very different responses children gave to the
various consistency questions. These are revealed in a repeated measures ANOVA comparing
children’s scores across the six types of transformations. Mauchly’s test of sphericity indicated
that homogeneity of variance assumptions were not met, and therefore the Greenhouse-Geisser
adjustment was used. There was a significant main effect of type of transformation in question
(F3.468, 315.561 = 61.419, p < 0.001). Mean consistency scores were greater than 1.7 (out of 2) for
change of clothes, language, skin colour and food. However, they were much lower for interethnic marriage (1.22) and, particularly, changing religion (0.62).
Kruskall-Wallis tests were used to assess whether older children were gaining higher constancy
scores than younger children across all these types of transformation. Non-parametric tests were
employed because variances across the three age groups varied significantly from one another.
Significant age differences were found for change of clothes (X2=8.110, df = 2, p = .017), food
(X2=10.068, df = 2, p = .007), religion (X2=6.138, df = 2, p = .046) and marriage (X2=8.450, df =
2, p = .015), and there was a marginally significant difference for change of language (X2=5.298,
df = 2, p = .071). As table 2 shows, older children’s constancy scores were higher than younger
children’s for clothes, food and language, but for religion and marriage, there was a U-shaped
pattern, whereby year 4 children scored lower than years 2 and 6.
Table 2. Children’s scores on different consistency question types
Means and (standard deviations)
Change clothes
Learn language
Change skin colour
Eat different food
Inter-ethnic marriage
Change religion
Year group
2 (N=30)
4 (N=29)
1.57 (.77)
1.83 (.54)
1.57 (.77)
1.66 (.67)
1.67 (.71)
1.66 (.67)
1.57 (.73)
1.86 (.44)
1.33 (.92)
.83 (.89)
.87 (.90)
.34 (.72)
6 (N=33)
1.97 (.17)
1.91 (.38)
1.85 (.51)
1.97 (.17)
1.45 (.87)
.64 (.86)
Most children in all age groups asserted that changing one’s clothes, language, skin colour or
food would not lead one to change ethnicity. Here are some typical explanations for these
answers2:
Children’s ethnicities in brackets are according to school records. While most children identified themselves with
the same label as on school records, some did not do so.
2
8
Clothes: ‘It doesn't really matter if you change because some people, I see some people that are English
and they wear Indian clothes and they don't change and it's not natural to change.’ (Indian girl, 9 years 3
months)
Language: ‘She still knows English and um she can't just change just because she learned something of
being Indian, she has to become like go to church, believe in one God, things like that.’ (mixed white and
other girl, 7 years 4 months)
Skin colour: ‘I think she would still be Somalian but cos she could like say she could still pray to her God
and it doesn't matter if she's er white, brown or black, it doesn't matter, um she could be she could still be
Somalian.’ (English girl, 11 years 9 months)
Food: ‘Nothing you eat will affect your religion.’ (Arab boy, 11 years 6 months)
Meanwhile, however, the majority of children in all age groups maintain that if an Indian child
(for example) changed their religion, they would no longer be Indian. Here are some typical
explanations for this claim:
‘You just told me that somebody wants to change religion, so if they want to change their religion
they'll be a different religion.’ (Indian girl, 7 years 6 months)
‘If she, cos if she wants to become another language um she can change it but she won't become a,
um Sikh or Indian again.’ (English girl, 7 years)
‘Because yeah, you change your religion, if you're English yeah and you change your religion
obviously you're gonna change into a different religion.’ (Pakistani boy, 9 years 4 months)
‘I think she, if she did change her religion and become a Somalian and want to be a Somalian I
think she would.’ (English girl, 9 years 9 months)
‘He changed his religion and um I’m Christian, if I changed my religion to like Muslim now I'll have to
be like Somalian.’ (Black African boy, 11 years 1 month)
‘She'll become Somalian if she changes her religion cos like if she’s baptised or something she'll
obviously be in that religion but the way she was born will be her natural thing but she changed it
herself so it’s up to her. Cos it’s her own life really. No one can restrict her.’ (Afghan girl, 11 years 3
months)
‘If you change your religion um you won’t be English, you can't be English because you've changed
it.’ (Indian boy, 10 years 11 months)
‘If you change your religion and you was going to be like say if I changed from English to Muslim
then I wouldn't be English anymore because I'll be doing Muslim things.’ (English girl, 11 years 5
months)
Many of the children seemed to think that if an Indian (or English, or Somali) child changed their
religion, then by definition they would no longer be Indian (English, or Somali). Such responses
suggest that for these children, the terms ‘Indian’, ‘Somali’ and ‘English’ refer to religions,
making my question rather an odd one requiring a ‘nonconstancy’ response. This raises an
important and neglected question: Do child and researcher mean the same thing by these terms?
The issue is of course that shared reference does not necessarily entail shared meaning (Bradley,
1989; Vygotsky, 1956; cited in Bradley, 1993). In other words, I and my participant may both
happily use the word ‘English’, but we may each mean something very different by that word. I
tend to use the terms ‘Indian’, ‘English’ and ‘Somali’ as labels for ethnicity, reflecting a person’s
family ancestry. Perhaps for the children, they are names of religions.
This is an issue in all ethnic constancy research because researchers do not use the word
‘ethnicity’ in their questions. I also avoided the term because during 18 months of fieldwork at
Woodwell Green, I very rarely heard children use that word. In contrast, they frequently used the
9
words ‘religion’, ‘language’ and ‘country’, as well as words which might be considered as terms
for specific ethnicities, such as ‘Indian’, ‘English’ and ‘Somali’ or ‘Somalian’. Methodologically
speaking, it is therefore preferable to ask children questions about the specific ethnicities with
which they are familiar rather than use the term ‘ethnicity’ itself. The resulting issue of what
meanings child and researcher are making of the terms must be explicitly addressed.
So perhaps this research did not assess children’s views on ethnic constancy at all, but rather
religious constancy. Do words like ‘Indian’ and ‘English’ mean religions for the children? There
are ethnographic data to support this possibility. I observed on several occasions that when asked
to name religions (in Religious Education lessons, for example), the children of Woodwell Green
frequently named ethnicities instead. On hearing about this research, several teachers
spontaneously offered their own examples of this phenomenon, which seemed to be ubiquitous at
the school. Here are a couple of examples from a year 1 class of 5 and 6 year olds:
Example 1: At the start of a Religious Education lesson
Miss Hart asks, ‘What religion have we been doing?’ Mariam raises her hand, and Miss Hart asks
her: ‘Indian,’ she replies. ‘Noo,’ says Miss Hart. Adam raises his hand, and Miss Hart asks him:
‘Hindu,’ he replies. Miss Hart says that’s right and asks where most Hindu people live. ‘In India,’
Zain says. Miss Hart agrees then asks the class, ‘Are all Hindus in India?’ ‘Nooo,’ they chorus back.
Example 2: During ‘News’ on a Monday morning
Navjot tells the class that she went to the Gurdwara and ate food. Miss Hart says, ‘The Gurdwara is
a special place for—’ and Jagpal puts his hand up: ‘Sikhs.’ Nayna calls out, ‘and Indians.’ Miss Hart
starts explaining that it’s to do with the Sikh religion, and as she does so Nayna says, as if realising
her mistake, ‘Sikh is Indian.’ Miss Hart says that not all people in India are Sikh; some are Hindus,
some are Muslims. Navjot suggests ‘Christian,’ and Miss Hart agrees, adding it to her list. Nayna
calls out, ‘If you’re Indian you are Sikh.’ Miss Hart says, ‘There’s a part of India—is it the Punjab?’
‘Yeah,’ says Nayna. Miss Hart explains that most people there are Sikh, but in other parts of India
there are more Hindus, Muslims and Christians. She finishes by asking the class ‘Are all Indians
Sikh?’ ‘Noo,’ chorus a few of the children.
In these extracts, the children see ethnic terms such as ‘Indian’ as being types of religion. My
fieldwork and an earlier pilot study (Woods, 2007) had led me to anticipate this issue so this
study also asked children to name up to four religions. If children view terms such as Indian,
English and Somali as referring to specific religions, they are also likely to name ethnicities such
as these when asked to give examples of religions. Indeed, 30% of the examples that children
suggested were erroneous, and most of those errors were words which could refer to ethnicities,
such as ‘English’, ‘Indian’, ‘Somali’ and ‘Pakistani’. However, a Pearson correlation found no
significant relationship between children’s scores on the religious change questions and their
percentage error on the naming religions question (r = -.04, n = 80, p = .352, 1-tailed), nor the
percentage of their answers to the naming religions question that were ethnicities (r = -.02, n =
80, p = .417, 1-tailed).
This result suggests that children’s answers to the religious change questions do not arise because
they understand terms like ‘Indian’ and ‘English’ to be religions. However, it may be that they
give the answers they do because they see religion as a major, perhaps even necessary element of
what it is to be Indian or English. Insofar as these children believe that religious conversion is
possible, they may very reasonably believe that if one changes one’s religion, one’s ethnicity
must also change.
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Stability scores: Ethnic change and freedom of choice
While most of the 6- and 7-year-olds claimed that another child could not change their ethnicity
when they grew up, the majority of 10- and 11-year-olds said that another child would be able to
change their ethnicity to at least one other. Preliminary analysis of the explanations children gave
for their answers revealed several lines of reasoning for these contrasting responses.3 Examples
are provided in tables 3 and 4. As table 4 reveals, children’s explanations for nonconstancy
answers often employed the rhetoric of freedom of choice. This rhetoric was frequently used by
teachers at Woodwell Green, particularly with reference to two areas: discipline and religion.
Taking discipline first, ‘behaviour choices’ were a popular method of disciplining and inculcating
responsibility at Woodwell Green and beyond. This discipline method is promoted in the British
government’s Department for Education and Skills’ (DfES, 2000) induction training manual for
classroom assistants, which states, ‘Use the ‘language of choice’ to teach and emphasise
responsibility for behaviour’. During fieldwork I often witnessed teachers using ‘the language of
choice’. For example, a teacher told her year 6 class that they could choose to continue chatting
and wasting time and have their end of term party cancelled, or to be quiet and still get their
party, while a year 3 teacher told a girl who was not doing her work, ‘Rachel you’ve now lost one
minute of your playtime. Your choice.’ Most children at Woodwell Green would have heard this
sort of language used regularly in the classroom. They may be taking it from a discipline context
and applying it to the concept of ethnicity. Indeed, when I showed a group of teachers at
Woodwell Green the data reported above, several of them independently suggested that the
children might be doing just that.
Religion was another area in which teachers talked of choice at Woodwell Green. For example, I
witnessed a year 6 teacher telling her class during a Religious Education lesson that she could
change from being Christian to Sikh if she wished. ‘Could you Miss? That’s weird!’ one boy
responded. The teacher’s message was reinforced by the head teacher, who told children in
school assemblies that when they grew up, they were free to follow whatever religion they
wanted, or free to not have a religion at all.
So the children in this study would often have heard talk of freedom to make one’s own choice.
One possibility is that some of the children are taking this concept and applying it to ethnicity.
This seems particularly likely given the close connections we have already seen that many of the
children make between the word ‘religion’ and terms like ‘Indian’ and ‘English’. In support of
this suggestion, a Pearson’s correlation found a significant positive relationship between
children’s scores for the stability questions about the future and for the consistency questions
about changing religion (r = +.33, n = 73, p = .004, 2-tailed). This was not simply a by-product of
correlations between the various measures of ethnic constancy, because there was no relationship
between children’s future stability scores and their overall consistency scores (r = +.09, n = 73, p
= .440, 2-tailed), nor between overall stability and consistency scores (r = +.17, n = 73, p = .140,
2-tailed). In other words, children who saw a person’s future ethnicity as mutable also tended to
believe that changing one’s religion entailed changing one’s ethnicity.
3
Analysis of the qualitative data has not yet been completed. The data will be analysed for common themes, and the
frequency with which each theme is mentioned by children of different ages and ethnicities will be calculated. Interrater reliability of theme identitification will also be assessed.
11
Table 3. Children’s explanations for ethnic stability answers
Theme
Birth
and
origins
Examples
‘She was born to be an Indian.’ (Indian girl, 6 years 10 months)
Family
‘Cos I think that some parents are strict with their children and I think they might
not wanna talk to them or not really get in contact with him if he changed his
religion because I don't think the whole family would change with him.’ (Indian boy,
9 years 7 months)
‘You can't change cos like it's, if you're born yeah, you don't normally change what
you already are because her mum and dad, they were Indian, they were born and
they never changed and that's I think, cos everybody doesn't change.’ (Indian girl,
9 years 3 months)
‘Somali is her religion, she can't change to another religion, yeah and like all her
family are the same religion so she has to be the same religion too.’ (Somali girl,
11 years 5 months)
Can’t
change
‘If they're English they can't change.’ (English boy, 7 years 2 months)
‘Cos, cos she's always been English and like you can't change yourself, no yeah
you just can't change yourself. You can change your religion and language and
stuff but you'll always be English.’ (English girl, 11 years 9 months)
Table 4. Children’s explanations for ethnic instability answers
Theme
Freedom
of choice
Examples
‘It's up to her what she wants to be, and we can't force her to be something that
she doesn't want to be.’ (mixed race girl, 7 years 4 months)
‘It’s her choice.’ (Kosovan girl, 9 years 6 months)
Change
religion
‘If she wanted to, when she grows up it’s her choice but when she’s little, when
they're little, if their mums are they can’t change it because that’s what they are
and their mums wont let them change it cos their mums, then their mums are
gonna tell them that one day you were a Pakistani when you were like little, and
now when you’re grown up you wanna do your own decisions so you gotta let your
own child walk on the right path, so whatever they wanna do you have to let them
do it since they've grown up.’ (Pakistani girl, 11 years 1 month)
‘Cos anyone that’s white yeah can be Christian or Muslim or Sikh. Muslims and
Christians can change their religion.’ (English boy, 7 years 3 months)
‘Because you’re allowed to change your religion.’ (Indian boy, 7 years 3 months)
Change
lifestyle
‘She could start wearing the same clothes and eat the same food and speak the
same language.’ (Indian girl, 9 years 4 months)
‘Because if she didn't want to be English and she wants to change her religion she
might n-, she might just wanna have a change, a new change of lifestyle.’ (English
girl, 11 years 9 months)
Change
national
ity
‘I could be British then change into Somalian by my religion, and then um change
into um Indian by like going to India and stay there for like for some years and
then I'll be Indian, and then that’s how people can change.’ (African Caribbean
boy, 11 years 1 month)
‘Cos he can change his passport, he can move to places and then get like a visa
is it, so then he'll become a citizen of there’ (English boy, 10 years 11 months)
12
Identity: Ethnicity construction in action
There were seven children in the sample whose ethnicity is recorded on school records as
‘mixed’. The experiences and insights of such children are a particularly valuable resource for
understanding how children go about constructing their own ethnic identities, because insofar as
they are expected to have a coherent ethnicity, they are likely to have to do some work in
constructing it.
Of the mixed ethnicity children in the sample, Leah was the most articulate about her ethnic
identity. She was 9 years and 9 months old at the time, and her ethnicity is recorded as ‘Other
mixed background’. Her mother is herself of mixed race, and her mother’s mother before that; in
Leah’s words, ‘My mum's dad is Indian and my mum's mum is like Burmese Chinese and Malays
sort of mixed there but and my dad is just like sort of English.’ Leah saw her ethnicity as
composed of four parts, three from her mother’s side and one from her father:
RW: And how about you, are you Indian or Somalian or English or something else?
Leah: See this is gonna be a hard question. It's like for me cos I'm part Indian and part Chinese and
Malay, and half English so it's like hard.
RW: Oh wow, ok. So you’ve got a very, interesting one
Leah: Yeah.
RW: Is any of those parts of you feel stronger than other parts do you think? Or would you like, do
you feel that they’re all kind of equally important?
Leah: Um, I'll say because English because I can speak full English, I'll say that's stronger than,
than Malay part of me and the Chinese part of me because I'm just learning how to speak Malay by
this [RW: Oh are you?] um book and er CD ROM where you put in the computer so.
RW: Oh great, good for you. And what about you said there’s an Indian part of you as well.
Leah: Oh yeah the Indian part of me, the English is the strongest then I'll say it's the Indian then
Malay then Chinese because Indian I've, I like to like listen to the music and like, I like watching
Indian films and looking at the subtitles so I sort of know what's going on.
Here and elsewhere in the interview, Leah draws on her family history in order to make sense of
who she is. When asked whether a child with the same ethnic background as she had could
change to become English, Indian or Somali, Leah replied that she could, but she would
nevertheless carry with her the other parts of herself: ‘It doesn't really matter if you want to
change to anything you'll still have what, what you have been with.’ Her explanation is a
primordial one, emphasising the origins of one’s parents. However, Leah also shows a
sophisticated awareness of the limitations of such definitions of ethnicity. When asked whether
this imagined other child might have been Somali when she was a baby, she said no, and offered
the following justification:
‘The reason why I said because of myself as well because she, if her family is like mine, I don't have
any Somalian people in my family even if you go back in generations and I don't think she would as
well unless her like great great someone was Somalian as well. Even I'm not sure if my great great
grandfather is Somalian.’
Leah acknowledged that her own ethnic identity might be incomplete because she has only
limited knowledge of her ancestors. This argument can be extended to create difficulties for the
primordialist position on ethnicity, because not only do the number of ethnicities in one’s origins
proliferate with each generation we consider, but also as we move back in time, we encounter
ethnicities not widely recognised in the present day, such as ‘Roman’ or ‘Celtic’.
While Leah’s account emphasises origins, nevertheless she retains a place for lifestyle in her
conceptualisation of ethnicity. Note in the exchange above that she was able to rank the
components of her ethnic identity according to their strength. The rank order is consistent with
her primordial account in that the highest ranking ethnicities are also those which loom larger in
her parents. Nevertheless, she offers non-primordial explanations for her ranking. She identifies
13
English as the strongest because she speaks English fluently, while Indian is second strongest
because she watches Indian films—an activity which was strongly associated with being Indian
by the children of Woodwell Green. The cultural aspects of being Indian were also highlighted in
Leah’s explanation for why she thought her friend Alma (a Bangladeshi girl) was Indian:
‘When I'm like talking with her because I am like quarter Indian as well and she's like, with all our
friends because we have like a group what we play with, some of them she talks about Indian
programmes with them on this channel and I just try and listen and understand as well.’
Thus, although Leah sees her multiple ethnicity as inevitable given her parental background, she
nevertheless ranks and experiences her ethnicities in relation to her social context—her
submergence in an English-speaking world in a friendship group of Indian children who like to
watch Indian films. Overall, two aspects of Leah’s account reveal a process of construction
(rather than simply discovery). First, she notes that the primordial model of ethnicity is
problematic in its reliance on a potentially infinite number of generations of one’s family history.
Second, her primordial position is moderated by a situationalist account of ethnicity in terms of
language, friendship and activities.
4. Conclusions
Some children seem to be constructing ethnicity as mutable
Although older children gained significantly higher scores on the identity and consistency
measures of ethnic constancy than the younger children did, nevertheless closer examination of
the data supports the argument that at least some children at Woodwell Green see ethnicity as
mutable, well past the age by which they are supposed to have developed ethnic constancy.
Firstly, most children in all age groups said that if an Indian, English or Somali person changed
their religion, they would no longer be Indian, English or Somali. This result, combined with the
children’s frequent references to religion during their answers to other questions in which religion
was not mentioned, suggest that they see religion and ethnicity as inextricably linked. Insofar as
they believe that a person can change their religion, they believe that ethnicity can also be
changed.
Secondly, significantly more older than younger children said that a child could change to a
different ethnicity once they had grown up. Children often justified this view by saying that
people are free to make their own choices about who they want to be. By applying freedom of
choice rhetoric, which they hear frequently at school, they are able to conceive of ethnicity as
something that can be freely chosen and, therefore, changed.
Thirdly, while Leah, a 9-year-old girl of mixed race, accounted for her own ethnicity in terms of
origins and gained quite high constancy scores, she nevertheless also recognises the limitations of
her primordial definition, and creatively supplements and enhances it with contextual factors. She
thus shows signs of actively constructing her own ethnicity, rather than simply discovering it.
Together, these data undermine the primordial position that ethnicity is fixed at birth, and the
assumption evident in the ethnic constancy literature that all children come to realise this during
the primary school years (e.g. Bernal et al., 1990; Ocampo et al., 1997). Many of the children at
Woodwell Green are constructing a quite different set of meanings around terms like ‘Indian’,
‘English’ and ‘Somali’, suggesting that ethnicity is something that we construct (Hitlin et al.,
2006; Jenkins, 1997; Quintana et al., 2006; Song, 2003).
14
The children’s conceptions of ethnicity in terms of free choice and religion offer a tantalising
window into the future when they carry their assumptions about what these terms mean into their
adult lives. Clearly, further research is essential here, tracing how these children’s constructions
of ethnicity continue to change through adolescence and into adulthood, and comparing the
definitions they are constructing with those produced by children growing up in very different
(for example, mainly white) settings. If we better understood the conceptions of ethnicity they are
creating and through which they understand themselves and each other, we might better
understand the opportunities and difficulties faced by future generations living in multicultural
communities.
Interdisciplinarity
What anthropology and sociology can do for developmental psychology
Previous researchers on ethnic constancy have made two mistakes. Firstly, they have not
questioned their own assumptions about ethnicity, nor asked whether they are justified in seeing
those assumptions as universal truth. Secondly, they have conducted solely quantitative analysis
of closed questions (e.g. Rutland et al., 2005). Even those studies that asked children to give
reasons for their answers only did so in order to assign them points which contributed to the
child’s ethnic constancy score (e.g. Aboud, 1984).
I would argue that anthropologists and sociologists can help psychologists avoid both mistakes.
Regarding the first, anthropologists and sociologists tend to be much readier to question their
own analytic categories and to see these as being socially constructed rather than inevitable. If we
take this as a starting point, we can be genuinely open to the possibility that children are making
sense of ethnic terms differently from the researcher, and that the difference is not simply an
error. Such an attitude can help us to avoid ethnocentrism. On the second mistake,
anthropologists and sociologists tend to prefer qualitative methods such as semi-structured or
open-ended interviews and participant observation. I used both of these to help me to make sense
of and to move beyond the quantitative data. This is certainly not an argument against
quantitative data and analysis. Rather, I am claiming that quantitative data alone is
impoverished—it is difficult to interpret and it does not enable the researcher to identify when
participants are using key terms differently from the researcher.
What developmental psychology can do for anthropology and sociology
With some notable exceptions, anthropologists have tended to neglect children (Morton, 1996;
Toren, 1996). In contrast there are many sociological studies of childhood (e.g. Ferguson, 2000;
James & Prout, 1990; Renold, 2004, 2007), but these tend to treat childhood as a discrete portion
of society with its own culture. This may be the case, but of course identity as a child is
necessarily temporary: children grow up and become the adults who are studied by other
sociologists, interested in social class, gender, ethnicity, and so on. Toren (1999) has argued
convincingly that our understanding of the concepts, identities and ways of relating to one
another which adults take for granted can be enhanced by studying how they constructed those
concepts, identities and ways of relating as children. This study provides an initial glimpse into
what such an approach might look like, and how it might inform our understanding of adults’
ethnic identities and inter-ethnic relations.
15
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