School contextual effects on adolescents’ intolerant attitudes towards immigrants: A multilevel and longitudinal analysis

• In Event: How Do Social-Contextual Factors Shape Youth’s Intergroup Attitudes towards Immigrants and Refugees across Four Countries?

Abstract

With its goal to educate tolerant and mature citizens, schools are an influential context of socialization. Research showed that curricular, climatic, and structural characteristics of the school context are associated with students’ negative attitudes towards immigrants.
Despite the empirical evidence, so far only a few studies examined effects across time – and thus allow conclusions to be drawn about underlying processes. Furthermore, it can be assumed that not all students react in the same way to school structures and practices and therefore inter-individual differences, for example the age of the students or students’ socio-economic background, should be taken into account.
The present research examined the effects of different dimensions of the school context on students’ negative attitudes towards immigrants. In doing so, the study focused on three aspects of the school context in particular: Learning about cultural diversity in school, democratic school climate, and student-student relationships.
The goal of the study was threefold: First, to examine if school experiences would affect student’s negative attitude towards immigrants and which aspects of the school context matter in particular (curricular or climatic)? Second, to disentangle processes operating at the individual and at the classroom level and, third, to examine whether the effects of school experiences would differ according to students’ age and the attended school track (i.e., practical vs. academic track).
The study is based on a sample of 1,276 German high school students from 73 classrooms (Mage = 13.58; 51.2% female). Participants were assessed over a time-span of three years in a longitudinal cohort-sequential study. Multilevel latent growth modeling was applied using Mplus 8.4.
While no significant effects were found at the individual level, student-student-relationships and experiencing a democratic school climate were associated with less intolerant attitudes towards immigrants at Time 1 at the classroom level. Moreover, experiencing a democratic school climate predicted changes in youth’s intolerant attitudes at the individual level across time. Learning about cultural diversity, however, showed no significant effect on students’ intolerant attitudes, neither at the individual nor at the classroom level. The examined school effects did not differ according to school track. Significant interactions with age, however, showed that the effects of student-student-relationships and democratic school climate were significantly stronger among older than among younger students.
Overall, our findings underline the importance of a positive school climate for the development of young people’s attitudes towards immigrants. The study also underlines the necessity to account for differential effects depending on the age of young people. Knowing about these differences can help schools to reach out to all students, irrespective of their individual and social backgrounds. The findings are discussed with regard to their practical implications.

Authors

• Katharina Eckstein, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany
  Presenting Author

• Marta Miklilowska, Umeå University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Peter Noack, University of Jena
  Non-Presenting Author