A systematic review of modern measures for capturing children’s ethnic and racial attitudes, stereotypes, and discrimination

Abstract

In recent years, there have been accelerated efforts among developmental scientists to understand and address children’s ethnic and racial attitudes, stereotypes, and discrimination. For such efforts, using high-quality and context-appropriate measures is critical. However, focused discussions and investigations of measures for capturing children’s ethnic and racial attitudes, stereotypes, and discrimination are scant. Accordingly, we conducted a systematic review of 1,001 measures that were used in 403 journal articles published between 2010 and 2022. Our review was guided by four questions: (1) What types of measures of children’s ethnic and racial attitudes, stereotypes, and discrimination are being used by researchers?; (2) How do measures represent target groups?; (3) In which geographic and demographic contexts are measures being used?; and (4) What evidence do we have about some of the psychometric properties of commonly used scales/tasks? In seeking answers to these questions, we found both strengths and problems with our field’s toolkit of measures. Taken together, our review provides an overview of modern measures for capturing children’s ethnic and racial attitudes, stereotypes, and discrimination; offers initial insights about the characteristics and psychometric properties of those measures; and makes recommendations for future efforts in the field. We argue that measurement evaluation is a fertile avenue for future work in our field and that widespread discussions about measurement are necessary to advance the science of how children feel, think about, and behave toward members of different social groups.