Youth's Social Cognitive Responses to Scenes of Ethnic Violence

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of the proposed investigation is to examine the ways in which adolescents' exposure to media depictions of real-world ethnic and political violence interacts with personal and contextual factors to affect attitudes, beliefs, and stereotypes regarding other ethnic groups. We are particularly interested in the extent to which differences in beliefs, attitudes, and stereotypes about other ethnic groups among children with similar backgrounds can be accounted for by differences in media exposure to ethnic violence and/or differences in identification with the aggressors and victims of violence, differences in empathy, and differences in ethnic and social identity. We also want to examine age differences in such effects and how those relations vary by the socio-ethnic context in which the child lives. We plan to address these issues with a study of high school youth in two ethnically diverse suburbs of Detroit - one that is predominately Arab-American and one that is predominately Jewish-American. The proposed design is a cross-sectional field study that will involve collecting data from two age groups of adolescents, ninth and twelfth graders, with approximately 200 participants in each group. Because of the sensitive nature of ethnic attitudes and stereotypes, we plan to assess the participants' ethnic stereotypes with two implicit measures that are less sensitive to bias, while assessing media exposure, identity, contextual and personal factors, and explicit attitudes through self-report interviews.