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♪ Hail to old KU ♪
Meagan: My name is Meagan Patterson and I'm an assistant
professor in the department of psychology and research in
education at the University of Kansas and I study
children's attitudes about social groups, including race
and gender, and the way that social group memberships
influence the development of personal identity.
In this study, we conducted interviews with about 100
children, ages 6 to 11, and we interviewed the children
both before and after the 2008 U.S. Presidential election
We were interested in children's perception of the
candidates in the election, their perceptions of the role
of race in the election, and also their opinions of how
others would perceive the different candidates and how race
would affect voters' perceptions and voters' behavior.
One of the major questions we were addressing in this study
was whether children's aspirations to become president
would potentially be influenced by the 2008 election and
the outcome of the election.
So one of the questions we asked in this study was just
asking children, "Do you want to be president?
Would you like to be president when you grow up?"
And we asked this both before and after the election and wanted to
see if rates of desire to become president would increase,
particularly for African American children
from pre- to post- election.
And we found that, in fact, rates of interest in becoming
president did not change from pre- to post- election for
children from any racial group.
However, African American children were high in aspiration
to become president both before and after the election.
So that's something that would be another possible avenue
for future research looking at: Does that high level of
interest among African American children continue into the future?
One way that KU has really helped to support this research
is that I did receive a new faculty grant particularly for
paying for students to be able to work on the project and
go out and conduct interviews and collect data.
One of the things that really interested me about coming to
KU was the connection to the Lawrence community so the idea
that KU has connections to schools and people in Lawrence
feel so positively about the university.
I think one thing we need to do is continue expanding the
research on children's perceptions of politics so this
study was one of the first to look at, for example,
children's sources of political information.
My next project is going to be a project about children's
perceptions of social class so that's another thing that we
really don't know a whole lot about so we're going to be
looking at children's perceptions of social class.
How aware are children of class based differences?
What are children's impressions of rich, poor, middle class people?
And then how does this tie into other factors that we know
about from children's development.
So for example, their perceptions of justice
and fairness and equality.
So that's where I'm going to be going with my next study.