Going Against the Herd: Social Ecologies of Multicultural Engagement in College

• In Event: Explorations of Diversity and Democracy

Abstract

We utilize a network model to explore the interrelationship of students’ engagement in multicultural educational activities with their perceptions of a socioecological context that supports intergroup mobility. We analyze a stratified random sample of 13,822 undergraduates at eight universities. The network representing similarity in activities and perceptions among these students has two modes in its degree distribution, which is highly surprising because many sociological network models exhibit a heavy-tailed, scale-free degree distribution. Further analysis of students in this network framework reveals a counterintuitive effect of intercultural and multicultural engagement. Namely, students who exhibit more complex response patterns not only engage most extensively in these activities, they also offer a more critical assessment of whether their campus honors diversity and internationalism.

Authors

• Chris R Glass, Old Dominion University

• Kimberly Glass, DFCI Biostatistics and Computational Biology, Harvard School of Public Health