The development of children’s subjective identifications with their own nation and state.

In the previous chapters, we have seen that many children, from an early age, show a strong emotional attachment to their own country, a pronounced sense of pride in that country, and often display in-group favouritism when making judgements about, and expressing affect towards, national and state groups. These findings imply that children's own country and national and state in-groups occupy a psychologically privileged position in children's judgements, evaluations and feelings. In the present chapter, we turn our attention directly to children's psychological privileging of their own country and national and state in-groups, and to the issue of children's subjective identifications with their own nation and state. This chapter is divided into three parts. The first part briefly reviews some of the previous studies that have investigated children's national and state self-categorizations. The second part of the chapter then reports the findings on children's self-categorizations and subjective identifications that were obtained in the CHOONGE and NERID projects. As we will see, there is extensive variability in the development of children's national and state identifications. Some of the factors associated with this variability are explored at length in this second part of the chapter. The third part of the chapter then reviews some additional recent studies into the development of children's national and state identifications, which have been conducted using a new scale, the Strength of Identification Scale (SoIS). As we shall see, these studies have confirmed the overall conclusion of the CHOONGE and NERID projects, namely that children living in different national and state contexts often exhibit significantly different patterns of identity development.