Measuring school children’s attitudes toward immigrants in Switzerland and Poland

Abstract

For decades, social scientists have been interested in studying individual attitudes toward ethnic minorities or immigrants and their development over time. Whereas these attitudes have been commonly studied among adults, little is known about children’s and teenager’s attitudes toward immigrant minorities. This gap might have been a result of a lack of standardized, cost-effective, and efficient large-scale survey measures tailored to young people. In the current study, we try to overcome this gap by introducing and validating a new, child-friendly, easily administrable picture-based survey measure of attitudes toward immigrants belonging to two ethnic minorities: blacks and Muslims. For this purpose, we collected a panel dataset at three measurement time points in two countries, Switzerland and Poland, including 5332 school children and teenagers aged 8 to 19 years, divided into three age cohorts. We performed confirmatory factor analyses within and across the samples and found that the new picture-based measures were reliable and highly comparable across measurement time points, age cohorts, and country samples. The findings suggest that picture-based measures may be a promising tool to measure attitudes among children.