LEVELS OF ETHNIC SELF-IDENTIFICATION AND SOCIAL-CONTEXT

The present study examines three forms of ethnic self-identification a mong Dutch and Turkish children age 10-13 in relation to their school class. We distinguish between three forms: ethnic self-definition, eth nic self-evaluation, and ethnic group introjection. First, the results showed a cumulative dimension of identification: Ethnic group introje ction was a higher level of identification than ethnic self-evaluation ; both were higher than ethnic self-definition. Second, multilevel ana lysis showed that salience of ethnicity in self-descriptions was more context-dependent than ethnic self-evaluation, whereas we found no con text effects for ethnic group introjection. Furthermore, Turkish child ren were more likely to refer to their ethnicity in self-description a nd to indicate a positive ethnic self-evaluation in classes with a hig h percentage of Turkish members. In contrast, Dutch children were less likely to refer to their ethnicity in self-description when the perce ntage of Dutch classmates was high.