Examining Race/Ethnicity and Fears of Children and Adolescents in the United States: Differences between White, African American, and Hispanic Populations.

Close connections between developmental theory and fear research are found throughout the body of literature related to fear (Angelino, Dollins, & Mech, 1956; Bauer, 1976; Davidson, White, Smith, & Poppen, 1989; Derevensky, 1979; Gullone & King, 1993; Hall, 1897; Jersild & Holmes, 1935a, 1935b; King & Ollendick, 1989; Morris & Kratochwill, 1985; Ollendick, 1979). Although many of these studies are dated at this time, they are a reminder of the predictable patterns of fears that have been documented through the centuries. Fears are considered to be a normal part of development (Morris & Kratochwill, 1985). Gullone (1996) described fear in children as "an adaptive reaction to a real or imagined threat" (p. 144). With cognitive and social development, the fears of children and adolescents change quantitatively (Campbell, 1986). For example, young children fear imaginary things (Ollendick, Matson, & Helsel, 1985), whereas by the ages of 5 to 6 years, school fears manifest (Ollendick, 1979). In contrast, "fears remain relatively constant and consist primarily of fears related to injury, natural events, and social anxiety" by age 6 years to adolescence (Ollendick, Matson, & Helsel, 1985, p. 465). Differences related to age and gender are often reported in studies on fear. Fears usually decrease as children get older (Burnham, 1995; Burnham & Gullone, 1997; Davidson et al., 1989; Gullone & King, 1992, 1993), although exceptions to the characteristic pattern can be found. For example, Angelino et al. (1956) reported that fears related to economic and political issues increase with age, whereas Gullone and King (1993) noted that the fear of criticism increased during the middle years of school. In addition, Burnham, Schaefer, and Giesen (2006) found in their study that boys and adolescents were more likely to have school-related and peer-related fears (e.g., from bad grades to losing friends) than were the younger participants and the girls. Overall in fear-related studies, girls, by a large majority, have reported more fears than have boys (Angelino et al., 1956; Burnham, 1995; Burnham & Gullone, 1997; Gullone & King, 1993; Ollendick, 1983). Throughout a century of research on fear (Gullone, 1999, 2000), studies have examined cross-cultural differences, for example, between Australian and American children (Burnham & Gullone, 1997; Ollendick, King, & Frary, 1989), British children (Ollendick & Yule, 1990), and youth from the Netherlands (Muris & Ollendick, 2002). Other studies have focused on fears of children in Israel (Elebedour, Shulman, & Kedem, 1997) and South Africa (Burkhardt, Loxton, & Muris, 2003). Regarding cross-cultural fears, Burkhardt et al. concluded that "childhood fears are at least to some extent culturally determined" (p. 95). These authors found that among three cultural groups of children in South Africa, fears were different across the cultures, with White youth being the least fearful. In addition, Shore and Rapport (1998) reported that "recent cross-national and cross-cultural studies suggest that ethnocultural factors may influence the dimensional nature of the construct as well as the developmental pattern of children's fears" (p. 456). Despite relevance in cross-cultural research (Burkhardt et al., 2003; Shore & Rapport, 1998), we have found no fear studies that compare the differences in fears across the three largest racial/ethnic groups in the United States (i.e., African American, Hispanic, and White youth). One study compared the worries of African American, Hispanic, and White youth (Silverman, La Greca, & Wasserstein, 1995), albeit with a small Hispanic sample size. Overall, "research on anxiety disorders in non-white youth is disturbingly sparse" (Ginsburg & Silverman, 1996, p. 517). With over 37 million African American citizens in the United States, accounting for 12% of the total population (U. …