Children's Identity Research Articles

On the gender-science stereotypes held by scientists: explicit accord with gender-ratios, implicit accord with scientific identity.

Women's representation in science has changed substantially, but unevenly, over the past 40 years. In health and biological sciences, for example, women's representation among U.S. scientists is now on par with or greater than men's, while in physical sciences and engineering they remain a clear minority. We investigated whether variation in proportions of women in scientific disciplines is related to differing levels of male-favoring explicit or implicit stereotypes held by students and scientists in each discipline. We hypothesized that science-is-male stereotypes would be weaker in disciplines where women are better represented. This prediction was tested with a sample of 176,935 college-educated participants (70% female), including thousands of engineers, physicians, and scientists. The prediction was supported for the explicit stereotype, but not for the implicit stereotype. Implicit stereotype strength did not correspond with disciplines' gender ratios, but, rather, correlated with two indicators of disciplines' scientific intensity, positively for men and negatively for women. From age 18 on, women who majored or worked in disciplines perceived as more scientific had substantially weaker science-is-male stereotypes than did men in the same disciplines, with gender differences larger than 0.8 standard deviations in the most scientifically-perceived disciplines. Further, particularly for women, differences in the strength of implicit stereotypes across scientific disciplines corresponded with the strength of scientific values held by women in the disciplines. These results are discussed in the context of dual process theory of mental operation and balanced identity theory. The findings point to the need for longitudinal study of the factors' affecting development of adults' and, especially, children's implicit gender stereotypes and scientific identity.

Early Childhood Education at the Cultural Interface

The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia emphasises that children's own identity is constructed within their given context of family and community. This article presents the findings of a multiple case study project undertaken within five remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, Australia. Community Elders were concerned that while their children had a positive sense of self during their prior-to-school years, on entry into formal schooling they experienced a disjuncture between those experiences and the expectations of a Western curriculum. The project involved partnering one university academic to work with each community, exploring ways of improving 4-year-old children's pre-reading and numeracy skills to enhance their capacity to engage with expectations on entry into formal schooling. Elders were determined to have the children be successful at school and saw success there as inextricably interwoven with their sense of efficacy to explore and to learn. Outcomes included positives such as children demonstrating increased pre-reading and numeracy skills and, importantly, the engagement of the whole community in the project. Foundational to the success was making Aboriginal ways of knowing, being and doing key components of learning opportunities provided to the children, supporting awareness of their social and cultural heritage.

Building Intercultural Understandings Through Global Literature

AbstractIn this article the authors share how they use global literature picturebooks with pre‐kindergarten, kindergarten, and first grade children in the context of A Curriculum That is International to develop the children's intercultural understandings. The picturebooks, shared through read alouds, individual and partner reading, and browsing, is focused particularly on children's personal identities as cultural beings and their identifying issues for which they take action to make the world a better place. In addition, the illustrations are discussed to develop the children's understandings of creating meaning through art. The authors argue that by through experiences with global literature children develop richer understandings of themselves as complex cultural beings and a perception of themselves as capable problem‐solvers who identify issues and take action to solve them.

“The University for the Poor”: Portrayals of Class in Translated Children's Literature

Background Scholars of children's literature have been investigating portrayals of females and racial groups for several decades, yet few have examined depictions of social class. Research on social class depictions in children's literature is needed in order to identify books that affirm children's class identities and offer portrayals of socioeconomic diversity. Focus of the Study This study investigates portrayals of social class in 35 titles receiving the Batchelder Award or Honor between 2001 and 2013. The Batchelder Award recognizes outstanding translated books with international origins. International books for children were selected in this study because American titles are thought to be middle class in orientation; the researchers hypothesized that the international books might provide a more complex analysis of social class. Research Design The inductive approach to qualitative content analysis was utilized. At least two researchers read and coded each book in the sample. The researchers examined passages referencing social class as well as other cultural constructs such as race/ethnicity, gender, religion, and nationality. Findings The researchers identified several markers that served as indicators of social class status: living conditions, food, safety and protection, healthcare, leisure, education, occupation, residence, speech and mannerisms, clothing/dress, death rituals, and material possessions. Social class was often associated with other identities such as a character's religion or ethnicity. Characters from typically marginalized class groups, such as the poor and the working class, were portrayed sensitively and with dignity. Conclusions The markers of class identified in this study may serve as a framework for other researchers interested in examining class in children's literature or media. The findings may help teachers and teacher educators identify and select books that realistically and respectfully portray members of different social classes.

Students Take the Lead: A Glimpse at Grand Conversations in a 2nd-Grade Classroom

Children bring their own background knowledge and experiences to their engagement with a story, yet teachers often fail to tap into their deeper understandings. This article shares the authors' experiences in introducing “grand conversations” to a group of 2nd-grade students and shows how one can facilitate authentic, student-led literary discussions to uncover deeper meaning. Interactive strategies during literary reading can help engage students as they discuss the theme's relevance to their own lives. Findings from the study indicate how such conversations can help learners make deep connections among story, their personal lives, and the outside world. This can be an important strategy in building children's identities as they try to interact with and understand themselves in respect to the world around them.

Social reasoning of early adolescents and parents regarding parent-child conflicts

Few researches have delineated how adolescents and parents view conflict in familial settings in Japan. Seventh and eighth grade junior high school students (n = 63) and parents (n = 68) were asked to complete a questionnaire using four hypothetical stories to investigate their judgments and reasoning about parent-child situations. Vignettes described health management, household chores, and two situations involving personal choice (clothes and friends) situations. Participants responded differently to personal, prudential, and conventional conflict. Parental acceptance of the child's demands and discretion and the child's tendency to reject parental authority were significantly higher for personal than for conventional or prudential conflict, and for conventional than for prudential conflict. Children rejected parental authority more than adults rejected parental authority when the child's choice was central to the child's identity; on the other hand, children accepted parents' conventional demands more often than adults accepted parents' conventional demands. These results suggest that early adolescents assert their rights when they judge the situation to be in the personal domain.

“Funny—You Don’t Look Jewish!”: Racial, Ethnic, and Religious Identities of Children of Asian American and Jewish American Spouses

“Funny—You Don’t Look Jewish!”: Racial, Ethnic, and Religious Identities of Children of Asian American and Jewish American Spouses

(Inter)Active Interviewing in Childhood Research: On Children's Identity Work in Interviews

Seeing identity as work produced in interaction is a starting point in this current study, were analyzing interviews with children living in economic hardship, and how everyday life in economic hardship in one way or another becomes significant for their identity work, is the main empirical material. This article is intended to illustrate how to (a) combine James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium's (1995) active interview approach with elements from Erving Goffman's (1974/1986) frame analysis, and (b) introduce this approach as a fruitful way of analyzing children's narratives. Also, by regarding the interview as interaction and thereby acknowledging the respondents' participation in the research process, I argue that an interactive interview approach has both ethical and analytical advantages that should appeal to qualitative childhood studies.

Social and Personal Identities: Their Influence on Scholastic Effort

When analysing the influence of identity on the motivations of scholastic effort, it is crucial to consider both social and personal identities. A child's social identity can be shaped by family background through the transmission of parental values vis-à-vis educational aspirations and achievements. As to personal identity, children may show a different locus of control over the successes and failures of their scholastic effort. In this paper, I develop an in-depth analysis of these aspects of social and personal identities and the nature of their interaction, and consider their influence on a child's effort in school through a theoretical model. Overall, the results from the model show that a (non-)pro-school social identity influenced by family background and locus of control along with their antagonistic or complementary interaction play a key role in determining children's scholastic effort by influencing their motivations.

Losing the Child They Thought They Had: Therapeutic Suggestions for an Ambiguous Loss Perspective with Parents of a Transgender Child

In our culture, gender is a deeply felt, value-rich, organizing principle; it informs our understanding of who we are as an individual, as well as who we are supposed to be and how we are supposed to act within relationships. This is especially evident in family relationships, and perhaps most strongly in the relationships of mothers and fathers with their sons and daughters. Thus, when a person comes out as transgender or transsexual, parents often experience a profound sense of loss and confusion about their child's new identity and role in the family. In this article, I discuss parental experiences of grief in response to their transgender child's gender transition and propose that parents who struggle with a child's gender transition may be experiencing ambiguous loss. I discuss these experiences in terms of ambiguous loss theory and introduce the concept of dual ambiguous loss. I also provide clinical suggestions for using an ambiguous loss framework with these parents, and offer directions for future research.

Becoming transnational: exploring multiple identities of students in a Mandarin–English bilingual programme in Canada

Guided by post-structural perspectives of identities as processes of becoming and transculturation and transnationalism, this study explores how multilingual students in a Mandarin–English bilingual programme form their sense of identities in a dynamic process. Multiple forms of data are collected, including observations, interviews and documents. The findings indicate that multilingual students are mobile, namely, they move across linguistic, cultural and ethnic spaces of interaction. In addition, they challenge the dominant discourse of any fixed and hyphenated identity and take up transcultural and transnational identities that allow their comfortable circulation among different worlds. This study calls for a need to unfold children's multiple and mobile identities and explores new possibilities for life.

‘I also Melayu ok’ – Malay-Chinese Women Negotiating the Ambivalence of Biraciality for Agentic Autonomy

‘I also Melayu ok’ – Malay-Chinese Women Negotiating the Ambivalence of Biraciality for Agentic Autonomy

Supporting children's online identity in international communities

Increasingly, adults and children socialise and communicate online. Children's safe and secure online communication with people from all over the world can increase their understanding of other cultures, which is an important goal in today's multicultural world. Our research studied such interactions between children from three countries, Hungary, Mexico, and the USA. The goals of our research were to study how children represent their identity online and what the implications are for the design of children's online communities. We used qualitative methods to derive a deep understanding of children's behaviours and motivations. Our results show that children exposed their true and complete identities online. They focused on sharing and learning about personal, ethnic, and gender identities via online media and largely ignored cultural identity. They learned about children from other countries and developed positive attitudes towards them. Based on our results we describe design guidelines for children's online identity tools.

Adoption, Narrative, and Nation, 1800–1850: The Case of William Austin

AbstractWilliam Austin (1802–1857), the child of Deptford laborers, was adopted de facto as an infant by Princess Caroline, the estranged wife of the Prince of Wales. She rendered the child's identity such a mystery that it prompted the Delicate Investigation in 1806, a quasi-judicial affair published in 1813 in the vexed volume known asThe Book. “Prince Austin” was regularly on stage during Caroline's carnivalesque rambles on the Continent from 1814 to 1820, frequently attacked in the loyalist press as “that bastard Billy Austin.” In the uproar of the Queen Caroline affair in 1820, Austin remained a target of loyalist scorn. Because Queen Caroline named him her residuary legatee at her death in 1821, his name registered aftershocks of queenite disruption through the middle of the century. In these narrative contests about Austin's identity, the metonymic traffic between a provisional family form and an absolutist national model bobbed and weaved in a disorderly fashion on the conspicuous stage of a dysfunctional royal family. On this prominent platform, adoptive contingency intermittently confounded closed absolutism.

Objects for a healthy lifestyle: Material culture and children's competences

Introduction All over the world, children's physical activity is becoming a social problem, but it is still rarely investigated by sociological research, as opposed to the study of food and digital culture [1] . This paper emphasizes the role of objects for promoting a healthy and active lifestyle during childhood. Within a sociological framework, I choose to underline the relations between childhood, body and material culture. Methods My empirical study is based upon the construction of twelve series of different objects, such as scooter, racket, bicycle, rope-jump, in French context. Using a qualitative and reflexive categorization of objects, referring to the worlds of sports and games, I have selected 225 objects in total. The analysis of objects matches a technological and a semiotic approach, in order to understand what the object do to children, and not only what children can do with them [2] . Results I show how different categories of objects can put children in movement and also develop motor skills or not. I also show how objects introduce children into the different worlds of institutionalized sports, games and children mass culture, supporting children's interpretative competences. Then, I analyze the relationships between the characteristics of objects and children's identities, in terms of age, gender and spaces of socialization, between family and sports associations. Conclusion The tension between the categories of toys and real sports equipment is discussed, underlying a “sportification” of children mass culture and a “childification” of sports culture. So, the role of the objects is not only to provide imitations of future sports activities for young children. On one hand, objects are designed to enhance children's competences in order to succeed in sports [3] , empowering the child with real and specialized sports equipment. On the other hand, objects are designed for fun and inscribed in universes of childhood consumption.

Drop the Knife! Instituting policies of Nonsurgical Intervention for Intersex Infants

When a child is born intersex, meaning that they possess genitalia medically categorized as both male and female, it is common for doctors to recommend surgical alteration of the child as early as possible to identify the child as either only male or only female on their birth certificate. These surgeries are largely cosmetic in nature and may still be performed based on now‐debunked theories about the relationship between a child's genitalia, sexual identity, and gender socialization. Further, these surgeries often have negative consequences, including the loss of sexual function and feeling in ones' genitalia. Currently, in the United States there are virtually no barriers to parental consent to these surgeries. In other countries, however, these surgeries have been contested and sometimes banned. As such, this Note recommends that, as was done in Colombia, legislation be enacted that severely restricts parents' ability to consent to these cosmetic surgeries. It also recommends allowing a child to be identified as intersex on their birth certificate, as was recently enacted in Germany, to help relieve the pressure to surgically alter a child as soon as possible after birth. Key Points for the Family Court Community Intersex children born in the United States are being subjected to cosmetic genitalia surgeries with little to no benefit. U.S. law does nothing to regulate this. Other countries are addressing this issue through legislative and court actions. States should consider restricting parents' rights to consent to these surgeries to shift the question of surgical alteration to the intersex individual themselves.

Action research with children and adolescents working on the streets of Athens, Greece

In fieldwork with children and adolescents working on the streets of Athens, Greece, the authors applied a multidisciplinary methodology, through which participants were empowered to articulate their own voice. This article discusses some indicant themes which emerged through participants' narrations and through their active engagement in Theatre-for-Development: (1) the role of family attachment and social networks promoting the continuity of children's cultural identity; (2) their perception of working on the streets as a vital need to contribute to family income; and (3) the way young subjects resituated themselves both in their relation with the mainstream culture and within their own culture.

Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation Kathleen M.Ryan and Deborah A.Macey, Editors. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013.

Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation Kathleen M. Ryan and Deborah A. Macey, Editors. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013.In 2013, when television can be accessed anywhere, any time, on demand and on a device that is often times not a television, it may seem bizarre to think of TV as a hearth-the center of the home, a place around which families gather, a place beside which we grow up. Yet editors Kathleen Ryan and Deborah Macey and the authors of the fourteen essays that comprise their book, Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation don't find such a comparison odd at all; in fact, their research points to the ways in which television continues to serve as a central site of engagement in our increasingly mediated world.Less sweeping in scope than some edited collections (The Television Studies Book, 1997; Television Studies After TV: Understanding Television in the Post-Broadcast Era, 2009), Television and the Self nevertheless brings a critical eye to a variety of topics that have been discussed in similar volumes, such as the impact of TV on children (The Children's Television Community, 2006), the role of gendered identity in audience experience (Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader, 1997), and the ongoing influence of reality television (Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, 2004), combining these areas of inquiry in a way that draws unexpected connections. Each of the book's five sections examines one aspect of the relationship between television and audience's experience of everyday life, ranging from family relations, to gender roles, to race and aging. But while these sections are a helpful guide, the essays here resist their boundaries; the authors' words speak across and through this book in diverse and multiple ways.To begin, Leah Rosenberg's essay on ritual and memory explores the role that television plays in audiences' individual histories and collective memories. Here, we see how television can be a way of dispelling the demands of the everyday, a ritualistic engagement, a nostalgic window into our pasts. We are also introduced to a theme that resounds throughout the book-the idea that television both reflects and informs our ideas about the world. Many of the author's findings echo this, from Johnson Jr.'s analysis of the invisibility of aging gay men of color, to Macey and Redmon Wright's deconstructions of televised femininity, to Kahlenberg and Miller/Van Riper's essays on the impact that television has on children's identity formation. …

Influence of a Traditional Play Program on Culture Identity of Children with Intellectual Disability

Influence of a Traditional Play Program on Culture Identity of Children with Intellectual Disability

Context and Implications Document for: Researching children's schooling identities: Towards the development of an ethnographic methodology

This guide accompanies the following article: Ceri Brown. Researching children's schooling identities: Towards the development of an ethnographic methodology, Review of Education, 10.1002/rev3.3027