Suchergebnisse

Migration is an ever-increasing phenomenon that is unfailingly the topic of public discourse. Recently, empirical interest has expanded to include the study of attitudes towards immigration. However, the focus usually lies on the opinion of natives, that is, persons without a migration background. This is unfortunate, because in many countries the proportion of people with a migration background is quite high, and many of them hold the citizenship of the receiving country. I expect individuals with a migration background to have more favourable attitudes towards immigration than the general population because they can identify more strongly with other immigrants due to their own migration history. Furthermore, I expect this difference to decrease with each subsequent migrant generation, with earlier generations holding more positive attitudes than later generations. For the analyses, I pooled data from the 2008-2016 rounds of the American General Social Survey. The subsample used included 7,362 respondents, 2,811 of whom had a migration background. Moreover, the data set allowed the differentiation of three generations of migrants. The results support the theoretical expectations. Persons with a migration background had more favourable attitudes towards immigration compared to those without a migration background. However, a closer look revealed that this is the case only for first-generation immigrants. The attitudes of second- and third-generation immigrants differed from each other on the 5% level, but the attitudes of neither group differed from that of the general population when the migrants' regional origins were controlled for.

In my dissertation, I investigated migrants' integration from two perspectives. Firstly, from the perspective of individuals who already live in the country and have been members of society for some time and secondly from the perspective of individuals who recently immigrated. With regards to the former, I especially focused on the attitudes towards immigrants of two societal groups that have so far been underresearched: children and individuals with a migration background. In my first study I developed and validated a new measurement instrument for children's attitudes towards immigrants. The new instrument is cost- and time-efficient and can easily be applied to children of various ages and across different cultural settings. Further, it is suitable for use in large-scale surveys. In my second study, I applied this new instrument and inspected the link between values and attitudes towards immigrants in children. The results indicate that the relations to some extent mirror those commonly found in adults, but they also show that we should not readily assume that relations existing in adults also exist in children. My third study on attitudes towards immigrants focused on adults, specifically on the differences in attitudes between individuals with and without migration backgrounds as well as across migrant generations. While overall migrants appeared to have more favorable attitudes towards immigration, differences between the generations became apparent. Regarding the migrants' perspective on integration, I was particularly interested in the migrants' national identification, so the degree to which they feel a sense of belonging towards the society. Previous research highlights migrants' contact to natives as a key factor in explaining migrants' national identification. In my work, I further explored this topic by analyzing and comparing the relations of national identification and contact to natives across three contact spheres: family, friends and workplace. Out of the three spheres having native friends had the strongest link with national identification. Concerning the other two spheres, the links were significantly weaker and highly depended on the control variables included.

For decades, social scientists have been interested in studying individual attitudes toward ethnic minorities or immigrants and their development over time. Whereas these attitudes have been commonly studied among adults, little is known about children's and teenager's attitudes toward immigrant minorities. This gap might have been a result of a lack of standardized, cost-effective, and efficient large-scale survey measures tailored to young people. In the current study, we try to overcome this gap by introducing and validating a new, child-friendly, easily administrable picture-based survey measure of attitudes toward immigrants belonging to two ethnic minorities: blacks and Muslims. For this purpose, we collected a panel dataset at three measurement time points in two countries, Switzerland and Poland, including 5332 school children and teenagers aged 8 to 19 years, divided into three age cohorts. We performed confirmatory factor analyses within and across the samples and found that the new picture-based measures were reliable and highly comparable across measurement time points, age cohorts, and country samples. The findings suggest that picture-based measures may be a promising tool to measure attitudes among children.+++Correction to: Measuring school children's attitudes toward immigrants in Switzerland and Poland, s. https://doi.org/10.1186/s42409-021-00024-9 (14 April 2021).