Poster #172 - Daily Intragroup Contact and Muslim-American Adolescents’ Religious Identity

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Context

Integrative Statement

The comparative social context and contact with individuals from one’s group (i.e., ingroup contact) significantly shape the meaning of the social identities of socially devalued minorities (Yip & Douglas, 2013), such as Muslim-American adolescents (MAA). A limited but growing body of cross-sectional and experience sampling studies has indicated that intragroup contact is particularly important for adolescents’ identification with their minority group on a stable and daily basis (Verkuyten & de Wolf, 2002; Yip et al., 2010). Despite the critical role of religious identity in the development of religious minorities (Phalet, Fleischmann & Hillekens, 2018), no study has examined how intra-religious group contact is related to adolescents’ religious minority identities. Importantly, whether the underlying mechanisms of adolescents’ daily intragroup interactions predict their subsequent attitudes towards their minority ingroup are also unknown. Social comparison theory posits that the social context may influence adolescents’ group identity by increasing the momentary salience of their self-definitions based on their group membership (Oakes et al., 1994), but this mediating pathway has not been empirically examined. Thus, we explored: (1) if the salience of MAAs’ religious identity mediates the associations between intra-religious group contact and their religious identity, and (2) the temporality of these effects using experience sampling data.
Participants included 13-18-year-old MAA (N=95; 51.6% male, Mage = 15.9 years, SDage=1.4) in Maryland or Virginia who were primarily from South-Asian (e.g., Pakistan) or Arab/Middle Eastern (e.g., Turkey) middle-class backgrounds, and born in the U.S. (90%). Experience sampling data was collected 6 times/day for 14 days where adolescents were randomly prompted to answer momentary questions about their intrareligious contact, and religious identity salience and private regard (Yip et al., 2013).
Analyses were conducted using Dynamic Structural Equation Modeling (Asparouhov et al., 2018) in Mplus. Results are summarized in Figure 1 and revealed that more intrareligious contact predicted less religious private regard through decreasing the salience of adolescents’ religious identity. Time-lagged models supported the directionality of effects, indicating that intrareligious contact predicted subsequent assessments of identity salience, and identity salience predicted subsequent religious private regard, and not vice versa.
Our findings suggested that MAAs’ Muslim identity is responsive to the salience of their identities, which are influenced by their daily social context. In contrast with existing research on the impact of intra-racial contact on ethnic-racial identity (Yip et al., 2010), we found that MAAs’ current momentary interactions with Muslims decreased their awareness of their Muslim identity, which reduced positive attitudes about their religious membership at subsequent assessments. During daily interactions with other Muslim individuals, MAAs may not face a threat to their religious identity, which could decrease the salience of their Muslim identity and ultimately reduce their need to affirm their feelings of positivity about their otherwise publicly scrutinized and socially devalued religious minority identity (Verkuyten, 2016). The implications of these findings for the study of contextual influences on adolescents’ group identities and the development of programs and policies to foster healthy identity development of disenfranchised MAAs will be discussed.

Authors

• Merve Balkaya, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  Presenting Author

• Salih Barman, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  Non-Presenting Author

• Charissa S. L. Cheah, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  Non-Presenting Author

• Madiha Tahseen, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  Non-Presenting Author