Educazione interculturale e misurazione del pregiudizio: la scala di Pettigrew e Meertens

Abstract

The article presents the results of a study carried out with 178 parents of fifth-grade pupils of the L. Tempesta state school in Lecce (Italy) within the Indire project Multicultural and Multilingual Schools 2004. Starting from the hypothesis that there is often high levels of subtle prejudice in the family which risks negatively and unconsciously conditioning children, the study aimed to assess the atmosphere, the social climate, that the children experienced in the home. The chosen survey instrument was the scale designed by Pettigrew and Meertens for measuring blatant and subtle prejudice. In its final version, the scale consists of 20 items and respondents must indicate how much they agree or disagree with each item by means of a Likert scale. It allows classifying respondents into three different categories: democratic, hidden and fanatical. The protocol was supplemented with an assessment of the academic qualification variable. The analysis of the whole sample showed a significant presence of democratic parents, for whom an inverse correlation was found between academic qualification and the two prejudice scales; a direct correlation was, however, found between academic qualification and the two prejudice scales for the fanatics category. This finding would suggest that a higher cultural level, instead of checking or restricting a prejudice attitude, actually exasperates it by amplifying and consolidating tendencies already present in the subject.