ABSTRACT
There have been many studies, conducted over several decades, of attitudes and relationships among children of different ethnic groups. Some of the earliest studies, mainly carried out in the U.S.A., focussed on which race or ethnic group children ‘identified’ with. In general, although with a few exceptions, these early findings showed that most ethnic majority children selected an own-race character on tests using drawings, photographs or dolls as stimulus materials from which children were asked to indicate the one that looked like, or was most like, them. A substantial proportion of young ethnic minority American children selected an other-race rather than an own-race character on tests of this type (Clark and Clark, 1939; Stevenson and Stewart, 1958; Asher and Allen, 1969). Similar findings were reported in minority children in various cultural/national contexts, including the Maoris in New Zealand (Vaughan, 1964), the Bantu in South Africa (Gregor and McPherson, 1966), as well as in the U.K. (Jahoda, Thompson and Bhatt, 1972; Milner, 1973).
