Children’s Essentialist Views on National Groups

You are a social perceptions researcher and are interested in whether there are differences in how children from Country A and children from Country B perceive nationality. You were specifically inspired by Siddiqui, Cimpian, and Rutherford (2020)’s study comparing the degree of essentialist perspectives of national groups between Canadian and American children.

To investigate whether there are any differences in essentialist views about national groups, you recruited 50 children from the ages of 5-8 years old from Country A and 50 children from the ages of 4-9 years old from Country B.

You ask the children to answer questions pertaining to the following categories of essentialism:

1. Stability
   • If children assume that each national group has “essences”, then they should also perceive the membership in the national group as being “unstable”. Example: A child is shown a picture of a girl whom is labelled as a citizen of Country A. The child is asked if the girl will still be a citizen of Country A even if she moves away.
2. Heritability
   • Is nationality heritable? Example: a child is told that a couple from Country B has a baby, and the baby is adopted by a family from a different country. Is the baby still a citizen of Country A?
3. Inductive Potential
   • Do children perceive members from the same group as having similar traits? Example: A child is told that a girl from Country A likes apples, while a boy from Country B likes oranges. The child is asked what fruit would a boy from Country A like.
4. Insides
   • Is membership biological? Example: Children are asked if an individual could be identified as being from Country A by looking at their “insides”, such as the individual’s bones.
5. Tradition
   • Do children attribute national traditions to the common preferences of the citizens of that country (e.g., maple syrup is a common condiment in Canadian meals because it is liked by Canadians) or to the environmental factors of the country (e.g., maple syrup is a common condiment in Canadian meals because maple trees are common).
6. Meaning
   • What does it mean to be a citizen of a certain country? Example: Do children attribute national identity to a trait of behaviour, such as being kind? Or do children attribute national identity to where an individual lives?
7. Acquisition
   • How do children assume an individual can become a citizen of a country? Example: Do children assume that being kind makes an individual a member of a national group? Or do children believe that moving to that country allows that individual to become a member of that national group?

The response options were binary for each question, where one answer would receive a score of 1, while another answer would receive a score of zero. Questions within the same category were averaged to give an essentialism score for that category. Scores that are closer to 1 indicate high essentialism. The responses from the children can be found below.

To compare whether essentialist views differ between children from Country A and Country B, please run the following statistical analyses:

1. Calculate the mean for the following:
   • Age of child participant in Country A
   • Age of child participant in Country B
   • Essentialism score for the children in Country A for each of the seven categories
   • Essentialism score for the children in Country B for each of the seven categories

2. Create a scatterplot graph to show the essentialism scores

3. Run pairwise t-test comparisons between the essentialism scores for each of the seven categories between Country A and Country B.

4. Because there are multiple comparisons, the risk of type-1 error is increased. Run a Bonferroni correction to account for this.

5. Create a mixed effects linear model using the categories of essentialism as a categorical predictor and Children’s age as a continuous predictor.

Files to Download:

1. P10_dataset.csv

References for further reading

Siddiqui, H., Cimpian, A., & Rutherford, M. D. (2020). Canadian children’s concepts of national groups: A comparison with children from the United States. Developmental psychology, 56(11), 2102.