Young children's ideas about the nature, causes, justification, and alleviation of poverty☆
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 64 8-year-old children, distributed as follows: gender (32 girls and 32 boys), race (4 biracial, 17 black, and 43 white children), setting (21 rural and 43 urban children), and socioeconomic status (36 children of lower and 28 children of higher). Teachers in 15 classrooms in 9 schools (3 rural and 6 urban) gave every child enrolled a letter to take home. The letter invited participation in the study and requested parental consent. The teachers subsequently gave each child
Results
The children in this study were expected to respond differently to questions about poverty based on gender, socioeconomic status, race, and setting. The expectation was examined using a series of two-way contingency table analyses for the four variables. Because of the likelihood of a high degree of interrelatedness among race, setting, and socioeconomic status, with the influence of one contingent on or possibly embedded within the others, it was assumed that investigating the effects of each
Discussion
In this study, 8-year-old boys and girls from rural and urban settings and representing different races and socioeconomic status backgrounds were asked what they thought about the nature, causes, justification, and alleviation of poverty. The children were questioned about these themes because they represent issues at the forefront of public thinking about the poor in our society. The children possessed varied ideas, and much of what they said contradicted a dominant societal (adult) ideology.
Pedagogical Implications
The coding categories shown in Table 2, Table 3, Table 4, Table 5, Table 6 describe the types of comments that the children in the study made about the nature, causes, justification, and alleviation of poverty. Teachers can use the frameworks to guide the development of a critical literacy curriculum: to understand and anticipate children's thinking about poverty as well as to create experiences, initiate discussions, and pursue leads that children provide.1
Acknowledgment
The study was supported by grants from the Spencer Foundation and the Proffitt Endowment at Indiana University (Bloomington) to Judith Chafel. Both authors assume sole responsibility for the contents of this article.
We would like to express our appreciation to Mary Harnishfeger (data collection) and Jeannine Bankey (interrater agreement) for their assistance with the study, and to the children, parents, teachers, and administrative personnel whose cooperation made it possible to collect the
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An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL, April 21, 2003.