Detectives & Diversity: A Content Analysis of Characters of Color in Children's Mystery Novels

This content analysis study assesses the depiction of multicultural characters in a sample of 22 children's transitional and middle-grade mystery books published after 1996. Characters of color were evaluated for the prominence of their role in the story and the presence or absence of cultural context and stereotypes among main characters. Most characters were classified as narrators or as non-narrator main characters, and over half of these were written with good cultural context. The one stereotype that appears to persist in this genre is that of impoverished or tragedy-stricken African-American characters; however, an underlying problem is the difficulty of finding enough Asian-Americans, Latino/as, and Native Americans in this genre to conclusively determine whether they, too, are portrayed stereotypically.Master of Science in Library Scienc