Measuring 5-year-old Mexican-heritage children's ethnic-racial identity attitudes, centrality, and knowledge

Abstract

Young children are aware of ethnicity-race, yet the field lacks measures to assess ethnic-racial identity (ERI) in early childhood. Thus, the goals of the current study were: (a) to describe three adapted measures that can be used to assess aspects of Mexican-heritage children's ERI (i.e., attitudes, centrality, and knowledge), and (b) to test the psychometric properties of each measure among 182 five-year-old Mexican-heritage children. Results from confirmatory factor analyses supported a 2-factor solution characterizing positive and negative ERI attitudes; the subscales demonstrated adequate reliability and findings provided preliminary support for construct validity. Findings for ERI centrality revealed significant variability among children and initial support for convergent and divergent validity. Support for ERI knowledge was more limited and suggests further development of this measure is needed. Overall, the current study calls attention to the importance of assessing ERI in early childhood, and provides developmentally appropriate assessments to stimulate growth in this area.