The assessment of ethnic sensitivity among Northern Ireland schoolchildren

Symbols and labels: Children's awareness of social categories in a divided society

AIMS

How and when children develop an understanding of group boundaries have implications for conflict resolution. When social divisions are not perceptually distinct, symbols become particularly important. Framed by the Social Identity Development Theory, this study was designed to assess children's categorization of symbols with conflict-related group labels.

METHOD

In Northern Ireland, 218 children (M = 8.14, SD = 1.83, range 5-11 years old) participated in a novel task designed for this study. The sample was evenly split by child gender and community background.

RESULTS

Children sorted symbols above chance with both the hypothesized national (i.e., British/Irish) and ethno-political (i.e., Protestant/Catholic) labels, showing a stronger association for the former. Sorting was also stronger for ingroup symbols, compared to outgroup symbols, and increased with age.

CONCLUSION

These findings reflect the potential role that a divided social world has on the development of children's understanding of conflict-related groups. The results also have implications for intergroup relations among children in divided societies.

Children of "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland: Perspectives and Intervention

The chronology of investigations focusing on the effects of "the Troubles" on the children of Northern Ireland is presented. Studies by Belfast psychiatrists, visitors from the United States, and Scottish and English psychologists dominated the first decade of the 25-year-old conflict and were marked by a distinctly pessimistic appraisal of the impact of the troubled situation on the children. Developmental psychologists from within Northern Ireland have been very active studying the children of their own country for the second decade of the crisis. The view from the "inside" is more complicated and, in some ways, more optimistic than the view from the "outside". In addition, results are reported from preliminary investigations involving children participating in a widely practised intervention scheme developed to ameliorate the detrimental effects of the troubled situation. The intervention programme may foster improvement in an individual child's self-perception but not necessarily in that child's perception of other and multiple stressors interact to determine the influence of such intervention schemes.