CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - African American children who have mainly African American friends may be viewed as "cool" and more popular by their classmates - but white students who affiliate mostly with other white students may be perceived less positively, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Illinois.
The study, which appears in the September-October issue of the journal Child Development, examined patterns of social integration, social preference and perceived popularity among third- and fourth-graders at nine racially integrated elementary schools located in small to moderate-size urban communities in the Midwest.
Travis Wilson, who conducted the study for his master's thesis in psychology at the U. of I. and graduated with his doctorate last spring, is now a professor of psychology at Oberlin College. Wilson's co-author on the study, Philip C. Rodkin, is a professor of child development in the department of educational psychology, which is a unit within the College of Education at Illinois.
More than half a century after federal legislation outlawed segregation in the U.S., multiethnic schools remain rare. The majority of ethnic minority students and white students attend ethnically segregated schools.
At the schools in the study, ethnic minorities composed 34-86 percent of the enrollment, with a 60/40 ratio of African American students to European American students or vice versa.
Students were surveyed over a year and a half about their friendships, whom they liked and disliked, affiliated with and perceived as popular - but were not asked about race or ethnic identity, giving researchers an unbiased portrait of the groups' social dynamics, Wilson said.
"That way, we were able to get a sense of how integrated the elementary classrooms were, not just in terms of racial composition, but if kids chose cross-race peers as friends and if they disproportionately disliked cross-race peers," said Rodkin, who also holds a faculty appointment in the department of psychology. "That makes the study all the more eloquent and subtle."
African American students who affiliated more with other African American classmates and who exhibited more cross ethnicity dislike were viewed by white students as having greater popularity and influence, but the reverse was not true - expressions of cross-ethnicity dislike and larger numbers of segregated friendships detracted from white students' social status in the eyes of their classmates.
"That's a very striking difference," Wilson said. "We're not splitting hairs in this study: We had an effect that was very solid in one direction for African American kids and the opposite for white children. The boldness of the effect here would suggest this is going to go way beyond this one particular study."
Perhaps children viewed social exclusivity on the part of African Americans as being a normal adaptive response to being the societal minority or as a symbol of racial solidarity and ethnic pride, whereas social exclusivity on the part of white students was perceived as prejudice, the authors suggested.
When African Americans were the minority in the classroom, they tended to "hunker down" and bond more with same-race students; however, white students' segregation patterns remained the same across classroom contexts.
Regardless of personal liking for individuals, African American heritage carried a certain cachet that white culture did not, the study found.
"It was as if the African American and European American kids had some sort of agreement that African American kids - particularly those who had same race friendships and peer groups - were cool, popular and had high status and social skills," Rodkin said. "It wasn't about being tough or aggressive, because we controlled for that, nor was it about breaking school rules or being nicer than other kids."
What the researchers did not find, as they might have a generation or two ago, was marginalization of African American students and high levels of animosity between the two ethnic groups.
"And that was a hopeful sign to us - that maybe things have changed," Rodkin added. "If kids can start out getting along with one another, then there's hope for them as adults and for the rest of us. Part of that process is happening in the schools in terms of integrated friendships, a more egalitarian distribution of popularity, and a form of respect that seems to cross ethnic lines. These are precious things to capitalize upon in our day and age. There have to be building blocks, and we see that there are."
Social status structures in the classrooms tended to reinforce children's preference for same-race friendships, "but that doesn't mean that diversity within a classroom or school can't lead to positive integration over time," Wilson said.
Both African American and white students, within their ethnic groups and cross-racially, viewed prosocial behavior favorably and associated it with high social status.
The study was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Spencer Foundation.