The Development of Ethnic Identity Among Chinese Adoptees

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe development of attitudes towards one's own as well as other ethnic groups are childhood precursors of ethnic identity. The current paper examines the formation of ethnic attitudes among 266 school-age children who were born in China and adopted by Americans and, at the time of the study, were attending 254 different elementary schools across the country. We hypothesized that a disposition to associate socially desirable traits with being Chinese would be fostered by a school environment that was itself racially and ethnically diverse. In order to test this hypothesis, we linked attitudinal data from a photo preference task with archival data quantifying the number and distribution of students of different races and ethnicities in each child's school and other relevant data elements from a parents' questionnaire. The results do not support the assumption that diversity at school encourages children adopted from China to associate socially desirable traits with being Chinese. To the contrary, children attending schools with greater diversity were less likely to show a Chinese preference, and more likely to show a White preference. Further analysis suggested that such paradoxical results may be explained by the privileged economic status of the adoptive children which gave them more in common with White than with other minority classmates.