Race and the Workforce: Occupational Status, Aspirations Article Review

Race and the Workforce: Occupational Status, Aspirations, and Stereotyping among African-American Children)

The purpose of the present paper is to provide a critical review of an article written by Rebecca S. Bigler, Cara J. Avenhart and Linn S. Liben, called "Race and the workforce: occupational status, aspirations and stereotyping between African-American children." There has been a lot of interest to discover the manner in which racial prejudice touches people's lives, especially in the case of the categories which are usually worst affected, namely the African-Americans. The purpose of this research article was to see if the perceptions held by African-American children regarding occupational status and their vocational interests were somehow influenced by the racial segregation of the workforce.

The researchers wished to see whether the race of the workers influenced the judgments of the children when it came to jobs. The social and economical background from where the children came were also considered as potential factors of influence. The already existing research suggests that African-Americans can complain about occupational disadvantages caused by prejudice about their skin color. The already existing patterns are likely to impact the future development of the African-American children and adolescents. Since there is scarce research regarding this specific issues, the authors of the present article thought it would be an important contribution in this regard.

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for only $8.97. The two coordinates that were taken into consideration are the following: understanding whether children were aware about which jobs are more likely to be associated to African-Americans vs. European-Americans and if the African-American children form occupational prejudices themselves, having race as a basic criterion. Already existing research demonstrated that children are more likely to associated good traits with whites and negative ones with blacks. The media in addition is contributing to a picture in which the white occupy important jobs, while blacks are forced to do jobs associated with a lower status.

Article Review on Race and the Workforce: Occupational Status, Aspirations, Assignment

As far as the methods of the research are concerned, the participants were 92 African children, among which 47 girls and 45 boys with a mean age of seven years and two months. The children were recruited from a racially heterogeneous school in the Midwest. There were four African-American investigators, two men and two women who interviewed the children in two sessions. The dependent measures were the ratings of occupational status, the occupational aspirations and the knowledge of the occupational stereotypes. The second session was meant to assess the individual differences in knowing the racial stereos of occupations, endorsing racial stereotypes of occupations and endorsing of majority -culture trait stereotype of African-Americans.

The conclusion of the article suggests that the familiar occupations were rated according to criteria of status, desirability and stereotyping. In the case of the jobs they were familiar with, children connected their… [END OF PREVIEW] . . . READ MORE