So a second group of families got the videos, and Vittrup told these parents to use them as the jumping-off point for a discussion about interracial friendship. Yet Vittrup figured explicit conversations with parents could change that.
#BRONSON LAB SKIN#
Prior research had shown that multicultural curricula in schools have far less impact than we intend them to-largely because the implicit message "We're all friends" is too vague for young children to understand that it refers to skin color. In truth, Vittrup didn't expect that children's racial attitudes would change very much just from watching these videos. Vittrup sent a third of the families home with multiculturally themed videos for a week, such as an episode of Sesame Street in which characters visit an African-American family's home, and an episode of Little Bill, where the entire neighborhood comes together to clean the local park. (Almost all) (A lot) (Some) (Not many) (None)ĭuring the test, the descriptive adjective "nice" was replaced with more than 20 other adjectives, like "dishonest," "pretty," "curious," and "snobby." Her first step was to give the children a Racial Attitude Measure, which asked such questions as: The goal of Vittrup's study was to learn if typical children's videos with multicultural storylines have any beneficial effect on children's racial attitudes. In 2006 Birgitte Vittrup recruited from the database about a hundred families, all of whom were Caucasian with a child 5 to 7 years old.
At the Children's Research Lab at the University of Texas, a database is kept on thousands of families in the Austin area who have volunteered to be available for scholarly research.