Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Biennial meeting of Society in Research for Child Development (SRCD), Salt Lake City, Utah, Amerika Birleşik Devletleri, 23 Mart 2023
Psychological attitudes about social status, social hierarchies, and social mobility often reflect stereotypic expectations about competencies and entitlements based on inequalities (Kraus, 2019; Elenbaas, 2019). Research in developmental science has examined the origins of attitudes about wealth status by determining the associations that children have with high and low-wealth individuals (Mistry et al., 2015). More recently research has concentrated on the role that socioeconomic status plays regarding children’s and adolescents’ decisions about social relationships, including inclusion and exclusion, as well as sharing resources and opportunities (Ahl et al., 2018; Burkholder et al., 2021). These studies have demonstrated that children are more likely to expect high-wealth peers to share resources and to give priority to same-wealth peers when considering inclusion in a group. Only a few studies have examined social and moral reasoning about other peers’ decisions to exclude based on wealth status or how these judgments are related to their own wealth background. Moreover, most of the current research has been conducted in the U.S., with little examination of this topic in non-U.S. contexts (for an exception, see Grütter et al., 2022 in Nepal). The current study investigated children’s reasoning about intergroup exclusion by focusing on socioeconomic status (SES) as a potential exclusion criterion for children and adolescents in peer contexts and how one’s own SES was related to these evaluations in Turkey.
Participants consisted of 270 children living in a metropolitan area of Turkey. They were between the ages of eight to ten (Mage = 9.80; SDmonths = 9.33; 53.5% girls) and fourteen to sixteen (Mage = 15.51; SDmonths = 11.23, 61.7% girls) from low (N = 144) and high (N = 126) socioeconomic backgrounds. Children were presented with three vignettes, including scenarios in which a character from low SES was excluded from afterschool peer activities. They were asked for their exclusion evaluations, related justifications for the SES-based exclusion, intention attributions to the excluder, emotion attributions as well as their individual perspective expectations pertaining to reasoning about SES-based exclusion. Children’s responses were coded based on the social reasoning developmental model (Killen & Rutland, 2011), past research, and pilot data. In order to test the hypotheses, analysis of variance (ANOVA)-based analyses were conducted. The results revealed that while participants overall evaluated SES-based social exclusion as wrong, adolescents were more likely to view it as more wrong than were children. In terms of related justifications, adolescents focused on unfair treatment and discrimination, whereas children focused on interpersonal aspects of social exclusion more frequently. Older participants from low SES viewed the excluders’ intentions as discriminatory more often than did older participants from high SES who desired to protect the status-quo. Overall, most children stated that they would invite and include the disadvantaged peer in their social activities as their individual solutions. The results have implications for understanding children’s and adolescents’ capacities for rejecting wealth-based biases and for developing school-based curricula to reduce prejudice and increase positive intergroup relationships.