Prejudice and Discrimination Against Children: Evidence from a Factorial Survey Experiment

Research in the fields of childhood studies and intergenerational relations has long been theorising and evidencing that children are a social group that is systematically put at disadvantage compared to adults. This paper makes a new contribution to the field by developing a conceptual framework of discrimination and prejudice against children informed by economic, sociological and social psychological scholarship on race and gender discrimination, prejudice and stereotypes. The framework produces testable assumptions on the causal effect of an individual being a child as opposed to adult on how adults behave towards the individual (discrimination). This effect is explained through extended and refined ideas around adult-centrism, adultism, ageism and childism (prejudice).

Assumptions derived from the framework are tested using an online factorial survey experiment conducted with a representative sample of 500 adults in the UK, including parents and non-parents. This design (sometimes called vignette experiment) is a method common in discrimination research allowing to identify a direct causal effect of one condition (child) versus another condition (adult) on a respondent’s rating of a scenario (vignette). This factorial survey experiment captures discrimination against children by asking respondents to indicate how appropriate a behaviour is towards an individual. The condition that varies within each scenario is whether the individual is a child or an adult. The scenarios cover life domains that overlap for children and adults such as within-family interactions, interactions in public spheres and access to public goods. To shed light on the drivers of discriminatory behaviour we examine relationships between ratings of the child/adult scenarios and respondents’ scores on an adjusted adult-centrism scale. Implications of the results are discussed in relation to policy, parenting and practice in child-centred institutions such as schools.