Dr. Frances Aboud - Academics

After receiving her PhD, Dr. Aboud began her developmental research. Always interested in racial relations and how children think, it seemed obvious that she would study how children think about race! Dr. Aboud, together with her colleague, Dr. Mendelson, developed the McGill Friendship Questionnaire. This simple series of questions is designed to get to the heart of children's friendships and classification systems. Though it was no surprise that children classified others according to ethnicity, Dr. Aboud's groundbreaking finding was that "eight is the age of reason".

Dr. Aboud's research shows that children are more likely to keep emotional distance from children of other races, but that these barriers can be broken down by exposing racist children to children with lower levels of discrimination. Also groundbreaking was Dr. Aboud's assertion that a child's level of prejudice did not depend on his/her parents' perspective. All of this was published in her first book Children and Prejudice (1988).