Measuring the impact of higher education on student development regarding racial attitudes and support for race-based policy

Abstract

v CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 6 THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH 11 THE SOCIAL STRUCTURAL AND DOMINANT GROUP APPROACH 13 THE PRINCIPLED CONSERVATIVISM PERSPECTIVE 16 CHAPTER 3 : THE RACIAL SOCIALIZATION PERSPECTIVE 18 CHAPTER 4: METHODOLOGY 33 WEB-BASED SURVEY DESIGN AS A METHOD OF DATA COLLECTION 33 CHAPTER 5: RESULTS 49 CHAPTER 6: DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS 99 CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSIONS 111 APPENDIX A: WEB SURVEY 121 APPENDIX B: CONSENT AND PARTICIPATION LETTER 134 APPENDIX C: VARIABLE CODING AND CONSTRUCTION 136 APPENDIX D: FACTOR ANALYSIS 141 APPENDIX E: STEPWISE REGRESSION SUMMARY OF ALL SIGNIFICANT PREDICTORS 143 REFERENCES 146 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 154 The purpose of this study was to examine the educational effect of diversity course graduation requirements on undergraduate students' racial attitudes and support for racebased policy at a predominantly White Midwest university. The present research utilized social structural variables as well as classical and contemporary measures of prejudice and racism to analyze undergraduate students' racial attitudes toward African Americans and support for race-based policy. There were four major objectives in this study: 1) To consider whether or not the diversity course graduation requirements at a Midwest university reduce racial prejudice and racism which in turn would increase support for race-based policy. 2) To examine how political conservatism and interracial friendship before college could moderate the diversity course effect on racial prejudice and racism. 3) To identify the nature of Whites' racial attitudes toward Blacks, and 4) To offer a sociohistorical explanation of why racial conflict and controversies still persist in higher education, especially in predominantly White universities. To accomplish these four major objectives, an 85-question survey on the Internet was administered to undergraduate students at two different time periods during the 2000-01 academic year employing two different data collection techniques. Undergraduate students were contacted in their classes and asked to complete an 85-question survey on the Internet that consisted of primarily five-point Likert items with responses ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Factor analyses were used to ascertain the empirical independence of the classical and contemporary measures of prejudice and racism. Similar to some previous studies, even though there were strong correlations between some of the classical and contemporary measures of prejudice and racism, the factor analysis yielded old-fashioned and contemporary measures of prejudice