The 82.1 percent of the children aged between 11 and 14 who live in urban areas and coexist with gipsy students in the classroom think that they are “thefts and muggers”; the percentage in rural areas is four times lower (17.9%). The difference in the children’s perception of this ethnic group is considerably different if they live in the country or in the city: 65.4% of city children think that the gipsies are “bad or do bad”, a figure that falls to a 34.6% if those polled live in a village.
Those are the conclusions of a research work carried out at the department of Social Anthropology of the University of Granada by Sonsoles Sánchez-Muros Lozano and supervised by professor Juan Gamella. For this work, the researchers polled 241 children of the two first courses of Secondary Education (11-14 years old) from 6 Primary schools of the province of Granada, with the highest concentrations of gipsy students of the European Union, and in areas where the presence of such population has a long tradition and in several social-economic status. In these centres, 3 of every 10 students are gipsy.
What do they think?
The research work carried out at the UGR intended to elucidate the opinion of children about their classmates, through an open composition about a gipsy family and an open answer questionnaire.
Another conclusion is that 39% of the students reject or condition the presence of gipsy classmates and attribute negative features to them to a greater extent than the average, considering them as “violent”, “destructive” or “lazy”.
However, according to this work, not everything is negative. 20% of the polled children think gipsy people “to be cheerful”, a figure which reaches 64% when they are connected with art emphasizing their creative qualities. In addition, 19% consider them to be “very hard-working” and industrious. According to the researcher, such schools “reveal examples of inter-ethnic solidarity and mutual cooperation”.
Sonsoles Sánchez-Muros emphasizes the need of “using the personal experience of the children, who usually base their assessment on their own personal experience at this age”. The researcher points out that the use of network analysis would be advisable for the identification, recruitment and training of opinion leaders who exercise their influence to modify opinion climates in the classroom. “It is necessary to not stress ethnic differences nor to make constructions from them, but to work the concept of equal opportunities in the classroom”, she concludes.
Sonsoles Sánchez-Muros Lozano and Juan Gamella obtained the Bancaja National Research Prize in the year 1998 for this research line.
Reference:
Sonsoles Sánchez-Muros. Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Granada. Phone number: 958 240 694. E-mail: sonsoles@ugr.es
