A Comparison of Prejudiced and Nonprejudiced Freshman Elementary Education Women

THE PURPOSE of this study was to deter mine whether prejudiced college students indicate they have certain environmental backgrounds or personality traits which are different from the students who are not prejudiced. In reviewing the research concerning preju diced college students, it was readily noted that rather few studies have been reported. Solomon and Braunschneider, at Michigan State College, have had a questionnaire in an effort to deter mine the influence of course work on prejudicial attitudes (10). Plant, at San Jose State College, has illustrated that significant changes can occur in regard to ethnocentricity in students over a four-year school period (9). McNeil administered stereotype comparison forms to high-school stu dents in an effort to determine the high-school environment's influence upon prejudicial atti tudes (7). Some of the obvious obstacles encoun tered by researchers in working with the degrees of prejudiced attitudes in student populations included problems concerned with sampling tech niques, the diffuse nature of the populations themselves, and perhaps most crucial, construct ing instruments for assessing prejudiced attitudes. The instrument used to separate the students in regard to prejudiced feelings in this study was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. This test is constructed so as to lend itself to a dissective treatment. Within its dimensions, re searchers have developed subscales to indicate attitudinal patterns concerning self concept (4), anxiety (8), ethnocentricism (1), morality (6), and prejudice (5,2). Gough (5), through item analysis, has formulated the Pr scale, a measure of prejudice. Although originally this scale was derived to measure the degrees of anti-semitic feelings, its application in this study was ex tended to include prejudicial feelings in general. This Pr scale has illustrated a high degree of both internal and external reliability. The split half reliability was .79, Sevinson-Sanford Anti Semitism .49, Maslow Security-Insecurity Inven tory .41 and California Ethnocentricism-Fascism .46 (1, 2, 3). It was felt that the Pr scale would be applicable in ascertaining prejudicial attitudes I of students at State University College at Buffalo. In addition, the MMPI answer sheets of all stu dents attending the college were available for rescoring the Pr responses.