Do children construct or discover
ethnicity? Insights from a west
London primary school
Dr Ruth Woods
Canterbury Christ Church University
ruth.woods@canterbury.ac.uk
Outline
• Introduction to ethnic constancy
– Is ethnicity fixed or mutable?
• This study
– Method & findings
• A closer look
• Conclusions
1. Introduction
Ethnic constancy
• ‘the understanding that
ethnic group
membership is
immutable and… does
not change with age’
(Nesdale, 2004, p.230)
• Based on gender
constancy (Kohlberg,
1966)
• Emerges 7-9 years
(Ruble et al., 2004)
• Identity: Knowledge
of own and others’
ethnicities
• Stability: Constancy
over time
• Consistency:
Constancy over
settings & physical
transformations
Examples of previous research:
Aboud (1984)
• Child views photos of Italian Canadian boy
dressing up in Native Indian Canadian clothing
• ‘What is this child—an Italian or an Indian?’
• ‘What makes an Italian Canadian be an Italian
Canadian?’ ‘What makes a Native Indian be a
Native Indian?’
• ‘Can an Italian change his parents and
grandparents to make them Indian?’
Examples of previous research:
Bernal et al. (1990), Ocampo et al. (1997)
• Mexican American children
• Ethnic stability: ‘When you become a
grown up person, will you be Mexican?’
• Ethnic consistency: ‘If you changed your
hair colour to blonde, would you be
Mexican?’
Is ethnicity constant?
EC researchers
• Ethnicity is about
origins
• Children on universal
pathway towards this
knowledge
• Children ‘realize that
their ethnic
characteristics are
permanent’ (Bernal et
al., 1990, p.5)
Sociology &
anthropology
• Ethnicity as socially
constructed (Jenkins,
1997; Song, 2003)
• Origins only important
if people make them so
• Eriksen’s (2002) ‘myths
of common origin’
(p.13)
2. This study
Research site
• Large multicultural primary school, West
London
– Approx 30% Indian, 14% English, 14%
Somali, 7% Pakistani, 35% 30 other
ethnicities
• 92 (of 270) children interviewed
– 45% Indian, 16% English, 7% Somali, 7%
Pakistani, 27% other
– Years 2 (mean 7 years 4 months), 4 (mean 9
years 4 months), 6 (mean 11 years 4 months)
Questions
• Identity
– Can you think of someone in your year who is: English;
Indian; Somali?
– Are you English, Indian, Somali or something else?
• Stability
– When you grow up, will you be Indian or something else?
– Could you change into an English person if you wanted to?
– Past, future, self and other
• Consistency
– A Somali girl [who lives round here] is thinking of putting
on some Indian clothes. If she did that, would she still be
Somali or would she become Indian do you think?
– Clothes, food, skin colour, language, religion, marriage
– Somali—Indian, Indian—English
Identity
Identity score %
100
80
60
40
20
0
2
4
Year group
(F2,84 = 2.468, p=.091)
6
Stability
Stability score %
100
80
60
40
20
0
2
4
year group
(F2,70 = 2.704, p=.074)
6
Stability of own ethnicity
Stability of other person’s ethnicity
(F2,70 = 3.741, p=.029)
Stability
of ethnicity in future
Stability of ethnicity in future
100
100
80
80
Stability score
Stability score
Stability
of ethnicity
in past
Stability
of ethnicity in past
60
40
20
0
2
4
Ye a r gr oup
6
60
40
20
0
2
4
Ye a r gr oup
(F2,70 = 4.777, p=.011)
6
Consistency
Consistency score
100
80
60
40
20
0
2
4
Ye a r gr oup
(X2=8.205, df = 2, p = .017)
6
3. A closer look
Consistency
Stability
Identity
Consistency scores on different transformations
100
Consistency score
80
60
year 2
year 4
40
year 6
20
0
Change
clothes
Learn
Change
Eat
language skin colour different
food
Change Inter-ethnic
religion marriage
(F3.468, 315.561 = 61.419, p < 0.001)
Why clothing, language, skin colour
& food can’t change ethnicity
• 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 race 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)
Why religion does matter
• ‘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)
• ‘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)
• ‘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)
• ‘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)
Religion & ethnic constancy
• ‘An English (/ Indian / Somali) boy is
thinking of changing his religion. If he
did that, would he still be English or
would he become Indian?’
• A nonsensical question?
• Indian, English, Somali as religions?
– Ethnographic evidence
• Shared reference does not imply shared
meaning
Religion & ethnic constancy
• Children asked to name 4 religions
• 30% error rate
• No relationship between errors in naming
religions and children’s answers to religion
consistency questions (r = -.04, n = 80, p
= .352, 1-tailed)
• So Indian, English, Somali are connected
with religions (rather than being religions)
Stability
• Stability scores decrease with age
• Most 6-7 year olds: a person can’t change
in future
• Most 10-11 year olds: a person can change
into at least one other ethnicity
Why a person cannot change
• ‘She was born to be an Indian’ (Indian girl, 6 years 10
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)
• ‘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)
• ‘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)
Why a person can change
• ‘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)
• ‘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 )
• ‘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 )
Stability & freedom of choice
• Teachers talked about choice
– ‘Behaviour choices’
– Choosing own religion
• Are the children applying this rhetoric to
ethnicity?
• Ethnic mutability, not constancy
Identity: Leah’s story
• 9 years, 9 months
• Ethnicity: ‘Other mixed background’
• ‘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.’
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.
Identity: Leah’s story
• Defines her
ethnicity with
reference to origins
• But recognises
limitations
• And ranks her
ethnicities with
reference to social
context &
behaviours
‘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.’
4. Conclusions
Ethnic constancy
• Children constructing ethnicity as mutable
– Consistency: religion questions
– Stability: freedom of choice
– Construction of multiple ethnic identity
• Challenge to EC data and theory
• Support for constructionist theories of ethnicity
• Further research of secondary school years
needed
What anthropology & sociology can
do for developmental psychology
• Questioning researchers’ assumptions
– Ethnicity as inevitably fixed
– Difference as error
– S&A: encourage questioning of own
assumptions
• Supplementing researchers’ analyses
– Quantitative analysis of closed questions
– S&A: Interviews & participant observation
What developmental psychology can
do for anthropology & sociology
• Sociology / anthropology: focus on either
adult or child
• Developmental psychology: How children
become adults
• How do people arrive at the concepts,
identities & ways of relating to others that
they take for granted as adults (Toren,
1999)?