Project Director

Warren, Amye

Department Examiner

Zelin, Alexandra I.; Silver, Christopher F.

Department

Dept. of Psychology

Publisher

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Place of Publication

Chattanooga (Tenn.)

Abstract

Racial and ethnic socialization is the way in which parents teach their children about race and ethnicity and it occurs in all families in varying forms. Unlike many white families, those of racial minorities tend to take an approach that makes their children aware of their race and its social implications. The present research project investigated the racial-ethnic socialization methods of Americans from varying racial and ethnic backgrounds to identify similarities and differences. This research analyzed the surveys of 52 parents and 32 nonparents in order to examine generational similarities and differences of race talk. Parents of color were more likely to embrace color conscious methods of race talk than White parents who were more likely to embrace color blind methods. Additionally, race talk did change from one generation to the next. Overall, the sample from this study indicated a high level of comfort with racial discourse which may be an important factor. All in all, race and parent status seemed to have significant effects. Findings from this study can be used to further investigate the content and context of race talk between parent and child.

Acknowledgments

Foremost, I would like to thank my thesis director, Dr. Amye Warren for her guidance, patience, encouragement, and most of all for believing in me. Thank you, Dr. Christopher Silver, for your great help in creating the survey through Qualtrics. Thank you, Dr. Alexandra Zelin, for your invaluable guidance in creating the survey questions. Overall, I would like to thank whole thesis committee for your immeasurable support, encouragement, patience, and willingness to see me through this process. I would like to thank the Psychology department, including the department head, Dr. Brian O’Leary for teaching me many of the skills necessary to even make this possible. I would like to thank the office of Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavor for their grant that made it possible to compensate the participants recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Thank you, Morgan Andrews and Leanza Greenlee, for providing me with great examples of research theses to follow. Thank you to Talley Bettens for all your hard work with organizing the data, coding, and giving me guidance in regard to reporting the data from this study. Thank you, Tierney Pine, for your collaboration in coding the open-ended questions. Thank you to the research assistants in the Psychology and Law lab for their help in narrowing down themes and coding data.

IRB Number

19-118

Degree

B. S.; An honors thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Bachelor of Science.

Date

8-2020

Subject

Minorities--Socialization; Socialization

Keyword

race; talk; socialization; ethnic; racial; conversations

Discipline

Family, Life Course, and Society

Document Type

Theses

Extent

111 leaves

DCMI Type

Text

Language

English

Rights

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Date Available

8-1-2021

Download

Share

COinS