What’s the Story? A Qualitative Content Analysis of Ethnic Minority Characters in Canadian Children’s Books From 1980-2010

Children’s books are fundamental in the socialization and development of children, and it is for this reason it is essential for children’s books to be analyzed as a way of understanding the social meaning embedded in the literary content. This study explores the under researched area of Canadian children’s books, and it seeks to describe the representation of ethnic minority characters in Canadian children’s literature. This study is based on a qualitative content analysis of 36 ethnic minority characters in 11 Canadian picture books. The findings suggest few Canadian children’s books explicitly state the ethnicity of characters but rather imply ethnicity using various physical characteristics, dialogue, or surroundings. The findings also recognize a shift occurred in the 1990s, as the experiences of ethnic minorities began to be portrayed in children’s books. The diversity of ethnic minority characters represented in Canadian children’s literature increased over the thirty year span analyzed. The article concludes with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of the research and acknowledges more research needs to be conducted in order to develop a comprehensive understanding of the depiction of ethnic minority characters in Canadian children’s picture books and the effect of this representation on minority members which cannot be determined from the present study.