Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
In December 1966 a study was conducted in the public and separate schools of Kingston, Ontario, to measure the development of political knowledge and attitudes of a group of young Canadian children. The research was patterned after the pioneering effort of F. Greenstein, and many questions similar to his were employed to enable the making of comparisons of patterns of socialization in groups of Canadian and American children.
1 The findings of this study are most fully reported in the author's 1967 MA thesis at Queen's University, Kingston. The study was conducted jointly by the author and Howat P. Noble.
2 Children and Politics (New Haven, Conn. 1965).
3 Dominion Bureau of Statistics, 1961 Census, Bulletin 1.2–6, pp. 45–7.
4 For the method used in structuring the sample, see the Appendix.
5 Space does not permit the listing in this article of examples of the children's responses. Interested readers may obtain a set of examples by contacting the author.
6 Greenstein reports finding reasonably accurate understandings of the role of the mayor, for example, in over 30 per cent of the Grade 4 children he studied in New Haven, and in almost 70 per cent of the Grade 8 children. Children and Politics, 58–9.
7 Erikson, E. H., Identity and the Life Cycle, Psychological Issues, I, no. 1 (New York, 1959)Google Scholar; Horrocks, J. E., “Adolescent Attitudes and Goals,” in M. and Sherif, C. W., Problems of Youth (Chicago, 1965)Google Scholar; Offer, D., The Psychological World of the Teenager (New York, 1969)Google Scholar.
8 See Jennings, M. K. and Niemi, R. G. “The Transmission of Political Values from Parent to Child,” American Political Science Review, LXII, no. 1 (March 1968)Google Scholar, and Jennings, M. K. and Langton, K. P., “Mothers versus Fathers: The Formation of Political Orientations among Young Americans,” Journal of Politics, XXXI, no. 2 (May, 1969)Google Scholar.
9 Greenstein, Children and Politics; Easton, D. and Dennis, J., Children in the Political System (New York, 1969).Google Scholar The latter book devotes several chapters to elaborations of this basic finding.
10 Children and Politics, 97–8.
11 Political Life (New York, 1959), chap. 16.
12 Children and Politics, 73.
13 The Religious Factor (New York, 1963).