Interventions to reduce prejudice and enhance inclusion and respect for ethnic differences in early childhood: A systematic review

By F. Aboud, Colin Tredoux, Linda R. Tropp, C. Brown, Ulrike Niens, N. M. Noor. 2012

292 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A systematic review was conducted of studies evaluating the effects of interventions aimed at reducing ethnic prejudice and discrimination in young children. Articles published between 1980 and 2010 and including children of 8 years and under were identified, harvested, and assessed for quality, both for the exposure/program as well as for the evaluation. In total, 32 studies (14 contact and 18 media or instruction) yielded 62 effects on attitudes and 59 effects on peer relations. An overall count of the positive (40%), non-significant (50%), and negative effects (10%) indicate a mixed picture. Overall, more attitude effects (55%) than peer relations effects (25%) were positive, and media/instruction (47%) was more successful than contact (36%). Most of the effects were observed with children from a majority ethnicity: 67% of the attitude effects were positive, and media/instruction and contact were equally effective at delivering these. Few differences were found as a function of the quality of the exposure and evaluation, but differences were found depending on the context of exposure (naturally occurring or experimental manipulation) and research design (random assignment or self-selection). In conclusion, the findings were more mixed than expected, though sufficiently strong studies exist to provide lessons for future research.

Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/67c119fd9490320222103d1fbec500c8560143ce

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Citations in the corpus

Confidence in Contact: A New Perspective on Promoting Cross-Group Friendship Among Children and Adolescents (2016, unknown): “Interventions to promote cross-group friendships could therefore address these abilities (for reviews, see Aboud et al., 2012; Beelmann & Heinemann, 2014).”
Changing attitudes to inclusion in preservice teacher education: a systematic review (2019, methodology): “Previous reviews on reducing prejudice and enhancing inclusion in early childhood showed that interventions that are ‘explicitly informed by a theory were stronger than ones informed by good intentions, or only implicitly by theory’ (Aboud et al. 2012, 333).”
Racial/ethnic socialization for White youth: What we know and future directions (2018, background): “Interestingly, some bias-reduction intervention studies have shown positive effects in reducing racial prejudice and facilitating positive outgroup attitudes among White youth in the short-term (Aboud et al., 2012; Devine, Forscher, Austin, & Cox, 2012).”
Preventing prejudice and improving intergroup attitudes: A meta-analysis of child and adolescent training programs (2014, background): “…programs with children and adolescents (Paluck & Green, 2009; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006), are limited to ages 8 and below and do not use a meta-analytic approach (Aboud et al., 2012), are narrative in nature, or somewhat outdated (Aboud & Levy, 2000; Pfeifer, Spears Brown, & Juvonen, 2007).”
Ethnic Diversity and Inclusive School Environments (2019, background): “To date, most psychological interventions designed to promote interethnic relationships among youth have focused 312 NISHINA, LEWIS, BELLMORE, WITKOW on primarily reducing prejudice and discrimination (Aboud et al., 2012; Pfeifer, Spears Brown, & Juvonen, 2007).”
Can we really reduce ethnic prejudice outside the lab? A meta‐analysis of direct and indirect contact interventions (2015, methodology): “…the aforementioned approaches, we systematically searched the bibliographies of previous reviews—more or less—related to the topic under study (e.g., Aboud et al., 2012; Paluck & Green, 2009; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006, 2011) as well as the reference list of each potentially relevant document that…”