The Role of Parents, Peers, and Classroom Ethnic Diversity in Development of Anti-immigrant Attitudes in Adolescence

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

Abstract

Purpose. This longitudinal study examined the interrelated effects of parents, peers, and classroom ethnic diversity on the formation of Swedish majority youth attitudes towards immigrants.
Background. Anti-immigrant attitudes pose a risk for the cohesion of multicultural societies and adolescence is a formative period for prejudice development. Attitudes of parents and peers, and classrooms diversity are assumed to play a major role in shaping youth attitudes. Yet, their long-term, relative, and interrelated effects have not been studied.
Methods. We assessed the effects of parents, peers, and classrooms on Swedish majority youth attitudes across 3 biennial measurements (N = 671; MageT1 = 13.41; 34 classrooms) by using longitudinal multilevel analyses.
Results. The analyses showed that within-person fluctuations in youth attitudes were positively related to fluctuations in peers (but not parents’) attitudes. Adolescents with more prejudiced parents and peers showed higher levels of prejudice and smaller decrease in prejudice than youth with less prejudiced parents and peers. Although a comparison of parents and peers’ effects showed them to be of equal strength, mediation analysis showed that parent attitudes predicted attitudes of peers that youth associate with, suggesting a greater importance of parents. In addition, moderation analysis showed that youth from diverse classrooms were less affected by their parents’ prejudice than youth from less diverse classrooms. This suggest that diverse classrooms provide first-hand experiences with immigrant peers tha might offset some of the negative messages about immigrants youth might hear at home.
Conclusions. Our findings suggest that, in the long-term perspective, parents are more important determinant of youth prejudice than peers. Parents set the stage for prejudice development by directly transmitting their attitudes and indirectly affecting what peers youth associate while peers attitudes explain day-to-day fluctuations in adolescent attitudes. Our findings also suggest that classroom diversity offsets some of the negative effects of parental bias.

Authors

• Marta Miklilowska, Umeå University
  Presenting Author

• Andrea Bohman, Umeå University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Peter Titzmann, Leibniz University Hannover
  Non-Presenting Author