Abstract

Roma children have been discriminated against for many years as they are denied access to high-quality education based on their scores on general non-verbal IQ tests. Rushton et al. (2007) showed that Roma perform more poorly than non-Roma on one such test (i.e., Raven Progressive Matrices), but suggest that this underperformance could be explained by Roma’s low socio-economic status. In this paper, we tested the non-verbal abilities of Roma children and expanded on the research of Rushton et al. (2007) by investigating empirically the potential mediating effects of socio-economic status on children’s performance on Raven Progressive Matrices. Results showed that the performance of Roma children was, on average, significantly lower than the performance of their non-Roma peers; however, the effect of ethnicity was partially mediated by the parents’ education and living conditions (while the parents’ income had no significant effect). As hypothesized by Rushton et al. (2007) some socio-economic factors can explain important variability in the performance of Roma children on general non-verbal tests, and their poor performance on such tests may lead to an underestimation of the true population mean.

Highlights

  • Several studies have investigated the differences between different ethnic groups when it comes to their performance on general non-verbal abilities tasks (e.g., Herrnstein and Murray, 1994; Lynn, 2006; Lynn and Mikk, 2007)

  • The results indicated that the Roma children had parents with a lower level of education t(262.68) = −13.81, p < 0.001, d = 1.47, they lived in households with lower incomes t(282.67) = −8.68, p < 0.001, d = 0.90, and their living conditions were poorer t(479.69) = 9.46, p < 0.001, d = 0.80 as compared to those of their non-Roma peers

  • The most important facet of our study was accounting for the potential effects of socio-economic status (SES) indicators on the IQ test performance of Roma children

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Summary

Introduction

Several studies have investigated the differences between different ethnic groups when it comes to their performance on general non-verbal abilities tasks (e.g., Herrnstein and Murray, 1994; Lynn, 2006; Lynn and Mikk, 2007). IQ of Roma Children no additional study has been conducted to further investigate this issue, and it is not clear to what extent the performance of Roma on such assessments is a reliable indicator of their cognitive abilities, nor to what extent their performance is affected by socio-economic circumstances. In this short report, we extend Rushton et al.’s study by measuring the performance of an identically sized sample of Roma on the same general non-verbal abilities test (i.e., Raven Progressive Matrices) and comparing it with the performance of non-Roma from the same communities, while accounting for the socio-economic status of the participants

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