Between Generalisation and Specificity: Attitudes towards Immigrants and Ethnic Minority Groups 1 |
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| Coordinator 1 | Dr Aneta Piekut (Sheffield Methods Institute, University of Sheffield) |
Despite the fact that many surveys ask about various categories of immigrants, attitudes towards immigrant targets are often analysed jointly in academic studies, after aggregating a few measures into a composite index or through modelling a common latent variable. This might help in improving construct validity, but might also pose challenges in data interpretation. Immigrant groups and various minority ethnicities are not homogenous and differ in terms of time of arrival, origin, dominant socio-demographic profile, occupations and public discourses towards them, hence they can mobilise differential attitudes. As such, by using generalisation procedures we might be losing quite a lot of valuable information about what the public thinks. At the same time, some public opinion polls only ask about opinions towards a broad category of ‘immigrants’, which brings a question of measure reliability, since respondents may be thinking about very different immigrant or ethnic groups, while answering this kind of questions.
In this session, we would like to explore diversity in opinions towards immigrants and minority ethnic groups. This session will specifically discuss whether the same theoretical mechanisms commonly applied in studies on attitudes towards a general category of immigrants, like contact hypothesis, integrated threat theory etc., work in the same way in case of all immigrant groups. We welcome papers unpacking differences in attitudes towards immigrant groups differing in ethnicity, race, age, gender, socio-economic status, religion or region of origin.