In my first paper with Seth Gitter and Savannah Wilhelm on refugees in Tanzania’s Nyarugusu Camp, we showed that, among child respondents, there appears to be a strong social norm around reporting violence at school. Children believe their peers will report victimization, kind of regardless of the things we might think would matter. Boys and girls think their peers would report at roughly the same rate, and the type of violence doesn’t seem to change their perceptions much either.
A natural question to come out of this is whether these attitudes and perceptions are coming from their parents. Luckily, I designed this survey exactly to get at that kind of question. A novel and important part of this study was to survey linked child-parent pairs, so we can compare children’s responses to their parents. We have a second paper, now a Towson University working paper, out to deal with just that question. Here we’re still using the vignettes (one-line short stories of hypothetical situations), so there is some measure of uncertainty given the randomization of the vignette characteristics, and we’re still concerned with reporting norms, not direct victimization, but we have some pretty interesting findings.
First, parents’ and kids’ answers are positively correlated, so while we cannot necessarily identify the mechanism, there does appear to be some intergenerational transfer of attitudes or social norms.
We use the error terms from the parent regressions (basically the variation in the observations that cannot be explained by the vignette characteristics) to represent this sort of nebulous “parent” effect. When we put these error terms into the kid regressions, there is a large and statistically significant effect on those terms. In other words, the unobservable stuff that determines a parent’s answers is clearly and significantly related to his or her kid’s answers, controlling for both the vignettes that children hear and their demographics.
But they’re not perfectly correlated. We wouldn’t expect them to be, given the vignette randomization, so we rely on grouped vignette characteristics to tell us a little more. Parents saw some violence type distinctions where kids did not; sexual violence (teasing or touching) was perceived as more likely to be reported than other types of violence.
Finally, the specific way the surveys were set up allow us to dig a little deeper into parent thinking. Parents were screened at the beginning of interviews and asked to identify and give consent for one of their children to be interviewed immediately after their own survey. Largely, this was the child in the age range who happened to be at home and we believe this to be relatively random (school is half day, most adults had several children in the age range of both genders, parents were chosen via random walk, etc.). Gender and age are balanced for the child sample.
So, given that the child was selected before any data collection took place, we examine the data to see if parents answer vignettes differently depending on gender of the victim, conditional on the gender of the child who was interviewed after them. Spoiler alert. They do. Parents who selected a boy child to be interviewed and heard vignettes about boys were more likely to think the hypothetical victim would report violence. This isn’t true about girls. We think this effect might be something like priming, that the child to be interviewed might be at the top of the parent’s mind while he/she is taking the survey.
Seth and I will be presenting this paper at the MIEDC conference at the University of Minnesota at the end of April. We’re super excited to share it with everyone!
ERIN K. FLETCHER 