Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    Contextual factors in children's and adolescents' predictions and evaluations of interracial peer encounters
    (2021) Burkholder, Amanda Rose; Killen, Melanie; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Direct experiences with peers of different races create possibilities for cross-race friendships and reduce racial prejudice and bias. Yet, interracial friendships remain rare in childhood, and decline by early adolescence. Therefore, an essential avenue for research in developmental science is to understand the conditions under which positive interracial encounters are maintained in childhood and adolescence, as these experiences may combat prejudicial attitudes and mitigate discriminatory behavior later in life. Children’s and adolescents’ willingness to engage in interracial peer encounters is not unidimensional, and research targeting how children and adolescents reason about interracial peer encounters provides a window into expectations about these relationships. The present dissertation includes a collection of three empirical papers that each explore contextual factors that influence children’s evaluations, predictions, and preferences in interracial peer encounters. Empirical Paper 1 disentangled children’s evaluations of interracial and interwealth exclusion using a design that focused either on race, controlling for wealth, or wealth, controlling for race. Empirical Paper 2 investigated how children’s and adolescents’ own racial group memberships influenced their predictions and preferences for interracial inclusion within a multi-group context that included information about wealth. Empirical Paper 3 examined the effect of parental and peer messages on children’s and adolescents’ predictions of interracial inclusion. Together, these papers provide evidence that during the interracial peer encounter, the presence of a multi-group context and socializing agents are vital to consider in order to understand, predict, and intervene on children’s and adolescents’ decisions and preferences for interracial peer contact. Discovering the emergence of and age-related changes to attitudes about interracial peer encounters in childhood, and the contextual factors that influence them, will provide valuable information for reducing stereotypes and biases as well as promoting positive peer relationships in childhood.
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    Children's Decision-Making about Social Relationships: The Impact of Similarity, Racial Attitudes, and Intergroup Contact
    (2004-04-29) McGlothlin, Heidi; Killen, Melanie; Human Development
    Cross-race friendships are a significant factor in the reduction of prejudice. The frequency of cross-race friendships is low throughout childhood and further declines with age. Three factors proposed to influence children’s decision-making about cross-race friendships were investigated: racial attitudes, perceptions of similarity, and intergroup contact. Participants were 138 European American first- and fourth-graders who attended ethnically homogeneous schools. Three assessments were administered. The Ambiguous Situations Task assessed implicit bias in children’s interpretations of ambiguous interracial encounters. The Similarity Task assessed children’s perceptions of similarity between peer dyads that varied by race and by whether or not they shared activity interests. The Intergroup Contact Assessment was administered to measure the amount of contact participants experienced with members of racial and ethnic groups other than their own. Results of the Ambiguous Situations Task were that children interpreted the ambiguous situations involving a Black transgressor as more negative than the situations involving a White transgressor. Moreover, the characters were evaluated as less likely to be friends in the situations involving a Black transgressor than in those involving a White transgressor. The findings from the Similarity Task were that children focused on shared interests to a greater extent than shared race in judgments of similarity and friendship potential. Evidence of the outgroup homogeneity effect was found, however. European American participants judged same-race Black dyads as more similar than same-race White dyads. Overall, participants reported low amounts of intergroup contact. Higher intergroup contact scores were related to perceptions of greater between-race similarity and to perceptions of less same-race similarity. In sum, the factors investigated had varying degrees of influence on decision-making about cross-race friendship. The findings point to the need for a multi-method assessment of racial attitudes in children, as well as to further investigation of the impact of intergroup contact.