Pride and prejudice in high school gang members

Adolescence, Summer, 1994 by Alvin Y. Wang

The RAAC was designed as a "covert measure of racial attitudes toward one's own and other racial groups" (Wooten & Brown, 1990, p. 3). The adjectives on the RAAC were derived from the Adjective Check-list (ACL) which was originally developed as a projective test of personality. Based on pilot research (Wooten & Brown, 1990) a total of 333 RAAC items was selected based on their positive or negative weights along an ethnic stereotyping scale. Consequently, 239 negative items (e.g., lazy, vicious) and 94 positive items (e.g., intelligent, ambitious) comprised the RAAC. Each RAAC yields a positive and negative score as well as an overall score (positive minus negative score). Wooten and Brown (1990) reported a Cronbach's alpha of .79 for the overall RAAC scores of 127 college students.

RESULTS

A total of 155 male high school students (51 gang members and 117 nongang students) was tested. However, due to the nature of the RAAC, students who were not Caucasian or African-American were omitted from the analyses reported below. Also, because there were only six female gang members, the data from female students were excluded from all analyses. The resulting subsample sizes were: 78 Caucasians (65 nongang and 13 gang members) and 77 African-American students (41 nongang and 36 gang members). However, dfs may vary as a function of incomplete data. Unless reported otherwise, a significance level of p = .01 was applied to all statistical tests.

Self-Esteem

Table I shows the mean positive, negative, and overall (positive minus negative) self-esteem scores as a function of group membership. A 2 (Race) x 2 (gang vs. nongang) Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) indicated that gang members had significantly lower levels of overall self-esteem than did nongang students, F(1, 119) = 20.44, [MS.sub.e] = .41. No other relationships were statistically significant. The lack of a main effect for Race indicates that African-American students did not have lower self-esteem scores compared to their Caucasian peers. This is in line with other studies (Porter & Washington, 1979; Simmons, 1978) that also found comparable levels of self-esteem for these two ethnic groups. It should also be pointed out that this finding runs counter to pre-1960s reports that African-Americans possess a debased self-concept which some researchers have termed "black self-hatred" (Dreger & Miller, 1960).

A separate 2 x 2 x 2 ANOVA was applied to the positive and negative self-esteem scores of students. The three factors analyzed were Race, Condition (gang vs. nongang), and Score (positive vs. negative). In this analysis a main effect was obtained for Score indicating that, overall, students' positive self-esteem scores were higher than negative self-esteem scores, F(1,119) = 8.59 [MS.sub.e] = .20. A subsequent analysis revealed that among the Caucasian students, nongang members (M = 1.88) had higher positive self-esteem than did gang members (M = 1.21), Fisher's Least Significant Difference (LSD) = 62. However, no difference was found in the positive self-esteem for African-American nongang versus gang members. There was also a tendency for negative self-esteem scores to be higher in gang members. This was the case for both Caucasian and African-American students, Fisher's LSD = .43, p [is less than] .05.