R. Montague Whiting

Children's Attitudes Towards Wildlife: A Comparison by Ethnicity and Community Size

Using questionnaires, we surveyed fifth grade students in eastern Texas during spring 1998 to evaluate their knowledge of and attitudes towards wildlife. We grouped data from 1315 completed surveys by community size (urban, semi-urban, semi-rural, and rural) and ethnicity (black, Hispanic, and white). We compared knowledge and attitude scores among groups using Kruskal-Wallis tests and evaluated relationships between knowledge or activities and attitudes using Pearson's correlations. We found that television was the primary source of wildlife information for the students; parents generally...