Ethnic identification on adolescents' evaluations of advertisements

This manuscript examines whether the strength of ethnic identity influences black and white adolescents' responses to advertisements featuring models of different races. The researcher digitally manipulated the race of characters in the advertisements as well as the number of race-specific cultural cues while maintaining all other visual features of these advertisements. One hundred seventy-three black and white adolescents evaluated black or white character advertisements. The findings demonstrate that black adolescents who have a strong black ethnic identity perceive themselves more similar to and identify more strongly with black character advertisements than do black adolescents with weaker ethnic identities. Other results suggest that white adolescents, despite their ethnic identity, find black character advertisements with varying degrees of black cultural cues as appealing as similar white character advertisements.