Shared Immigrant Identity and Intentions to Help Victimized Peers

• In Event: Intergroup Helping during Childhood and Adolescence: Antecedents, Motivations, and Consequences

Abstract

When bystanders witness others’ victimization, they can select to respond in many different ways, including by helping the victim or supporting the bully (Salmivalli et al., 2011). Recent research has documented that youth may be more likely to intervene to help ingroup victims than outgroup victims, with findings suggesting that Latinx adolescents with an immigration background are more likely to help a Latinx immigrant peer than are non-immigrant youth (Gönültaş & Mulvey, in press). What is still unknown, however, is whether this desire to help immigrant victims is limited to those who share one’s ethnic heritage, or if youth shared immigrant identity matters in intergroup bullying contexts more generally.
In the current study, high school students (9th grade, N = 151) assessed three conditions: 1) bias-based bullying (either targeting a Latinx or an Arab immigrant peer), 2) generalized bullying (targeting an American peer due to shyness), and 3) generalized bullying of an immigrant (either targeting a Latinx or an Arab immigrant peer due to shyness). Immigrant identity (Latinx or Arab) was varied between subjects. Participants with a Latinx immigrant background (N = 68) were compared to those with no immigration background (N = 83). Participants read hypothetical scenarios, and were asked to indicate how acceptable the bullying was and how likely they would be to intervene on behalf of the victim.
ANOVA analyses were conducted comparing responses for participants with and without immigration background, while controlling for intergroup contact, peer norms, and discrimination to isolate differences based on shared immigration background. Findings revealed that participants without an immigration background did not differ in their evaluations of the scenarios, depending on if the victim was a Latinx or Arab immigrant, but that participants with an immigration background judged the bullying targeting an Arab immigrant peer as more wrong than the bullying targeting a Latinx immigrant peer, see Figure 1. Further, those with an immigration background were more likely to expect that they would intervene on behalf of the Arab victim than on behalf of the Latinx victim, while there were no differences in expected intervention for those who did not have an immigration background, see Figure 2. Thus, findings document an interesting pattern: high school students with a Latinx immigration background judge victimization of Arab immigrant peers as more wrong than victimization of Latinx immigrant peers and are more likely to expect that they will help Arab victims than Latinx victims.
These intriguing findings will be discussed in light of the prior research on intergroup and outgroup helping (Sierksma et al., 2018) as well as the prior work on bystander intervention (Mulvey et al., 2019). It may be that immigrant-origin peers recognize that some groups of immigrants are especially likely to experience victimization and understand the history of discrimination targeting Arab-Americans in recent year (Brown et al., 2017). Directions for future research examining attitudes and intentions towards helping ingroup and outgroup victims will be discussed.

Authors

• Kelly Lynn S Mulvey, North Carolina State University
  Presenting Author

• Aline Hitti, University of San Francisco
  Non-Presenting Author

• Secil Gonultas, North Carolina State University
  Non-Presenting Author