French-Canadian, English-Canadian, and native Indian schoolchildren's perception of self and people in their social environment

• Main Author: Simpson, Doris J.
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1993/6186

This study investigated how Indian, French-Canadian, and English-Canadian schoolchildren see themselves and people in their environment. Fifty-six French-Canadians, forty-four English, and fifty-one Indians acted as subjects. Subjects were either in the 6th, 7th, 8th, or 9th grades. Their ages ranged from ten to sixteen years. The Indian subjects were from the Fort Alexander Indian Reserve and the whites were from Powerview, Manitoba. Both communities are located about 80 miles north of Winnipeg. A pre-test was administered in which the subjects were asked to list and define all of the good and bad words used to describe people they know. Then the subjects were requested to list the five most significant people in their lives. From the pre-test results twelve words were selected. These twelve words were used as scales in the semantic differential which was the assessment instrument. Then the role titles of twelve people in the social environment whom all subjects would have formed an opinion toward were used as concepts. A questionnaire booklet of twelve pages was formed. On each page in the booklet was a concept of the role title of a person and twelve scale words and their bipolar opposites... The findings showed that Indian subjects did not differ significantly in self-perception from the French-Canadian or English-Canadian school-children... Both of the variables of age and sex groups revealed no significant differences on the self-perception concept when analyzed by the analysis of variance design.