U.S. majority (European-American) and minority (African-American, Latin-American, AsianAmerican) students were interviewed regarding race-based and non-race based reasons for exclusion in interracial peer dyads (N = 685), evenly divided by gender at 4 th , 7 th , and 10 th grades attending 20 public schools. All students judged race-based exclusion as the most wrong followed by non-raced based reasons such as lack of shared interests, parental discomfort, and peer pressure. Minority students were more likely to judge non-race based exclusion as wrong than were majority students, and were more likely to expect that racial exclusion occurs, indicating that ethnic background and social experience are significantly related to interpretations of interracial peer dyadic reasons for exclusion.Most research on U.S. children's and adolescents' prejudice has focused on the extent to which European American participants hold prejudicial attitudes about minority individuals, particularly African American and Latino children (Aboud & Amato, 2001;Killen, Margie, & Sinno, 2006). As the urban areas around the globe become more heterogeneous, however, it is increasingly important to understand how individuals, both from majority and minority ethnic backgrounds, evaluate everyday interracial interactions, particularly peer relationships (Graham & Juvonen, 2002). This approach extends past research that focused on European American children's assignment of negative traits to others based on skin color to a focus on how children from a range of ethnic backgrounds evaluate intergroup relationships, specifically in peer contexts. The former approach provided a diagnostic test of whether majority children associated negative terms to pictures of children who Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Melanie Killen, Department of Human Development, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742-1131. mkillen@umd.edu.
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Author ManuscriptInt J Behav Dev. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2014 December 17.
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NIH-PA Author Manuscriptrepresented minority groups (Aboud & Levy, 2000). In contrast, the latter perspective has examined how children, majority and minority, evaluate social exchanges involving exclusion, and make attributions of intentions in social encounters. Our approach stems from research on social cognitive development (Smetana, 2006), which examines how children evaluate familiar everyday social experiences. The findings reveal that understanding children's social interpretations and evaluations of their experiences provides information about their behavior, both normative and clinical (Lemerise & Arsenio, 2000).Recent social psychological research with adults in the area of intergroup attitudes about race and ethnicity has been aimed at understanding the "target's perspective", which involves investigating how individuals who are typically the target of discriminatory and prejudicial behavior evaluate interracial interactions (Sw...