An Evaluation of Ethnicity Research in Developmental Psychology: Critiques and Recommendations

Abstract

This article aims to reorient developmental psychologists' view of “ethnicity” and align them more closely with disciplines such as sociology and anthropology. Developmental psychologists mostly treat ethnicity as apolitical, ahistorical and limited to mutually exclusive, homogeneous categories measured by decontextualized self-report questionnaires. Moreover, self-report “ethnicity” scales typically fail to integrate a full perspective on ethnicity, such as power, inequality, class, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, and generation. I take issue with the position that ethnic groups constitute fixed natural entities based on ethnic identities. In my view, ethnicity emerges in social interaction in specific social and political contexts. Hence, “ethnicity” is primarily a theory of social relations; it is intensified or abated when individuals engage in mutual interaction. I argue that no reference to ethnicity is politically impartial. Finally, I present a set of recommendations that might have useful theoretical and methodological implications for ethnicity research in developmental psychology.

Longitudinal Links Between Discrimination and Civic Development Among Latino and Asian Adolescents

“…Many researchers have noted the limitations of grouping youth from diverse backgrounds into pan‐ethnic groupings such as “Asian” and “Latino.” Developmental psychologists are actively grappling with the issue of how best to conceptualize and measure ethnicity in a meaningful way (Gjerde, ; Kiang, ; Umaña‐Taylor et al., ). It is practically difficult to sample large enough ethnic subgroups for meaningful analyses.…”

Parental Regulation of Infant Sleep: Round-the-Clock Efforts for Social Synchronization

“…Thus, a more context‐sensitive interpretation would involve seeing their practice during the first year as an expression of their relative freedom to regulate the sleep cycle of their infant in accordance with the particular needs of their own family, which was done by all families in the study during the first year. In that way, one may curb the tendency to treat ethnicity as a factor isolated from the social and political context in which it emerges; a tendency that has been observed in the field of child development studies (Gjerde, ).…”

Are Whites and minorities more similar than different? Testing the cultural similarities hypothesis on psychopathology with a second-order meta-analysis

“…Overemphasizing cultural differences over similarities ignores that there is more within-culture variation than between-group variation in most psychological traits (Adams & Markus, 2004). For several reasons, portraying cultural groups as bounded, internally homogeneous, and ahistorical entities has been challenged in developmental psychology (Gjerde, 2004, 2014; Gjerde & Onishi, 2000). This argument implicitly endorses a view of members of ethnic groups as passive vessels of natural, unchanging, and overwhelming cultural traits, an ideology defined as primordialism (Eriksen, 2002) or essentialism (Gjerde, 2004).…”