Building Bridges, Blurring Boundaries : the Contribution of Multiethnic Individuals to Intergroup Relations

• Main Author: Love, Angelika
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2020
• Subjects: Friendship; Group dynamics

Multiethnic people constitute an increasingly prominent share of the population in the UK and beyond. Nevertheless, most research on intergroup relations continues to focus on people on either side of a clearly defined group divide. The aim of this thesis is to integrate multiethnic populations into research on intergroup relations and to investigate a question that is often raised about multiethnic individuals: whether they build bridges between members of different monoethnic groups. Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical and empirical context of my research, as well as the multi-method approach adopted throughout this thesis. Across three empirical chapters, I then present research on monoethnic individuals’ context-level exposure to multiethnic people, and on their individual-level contact experiences with multiethnic friends. This thesis includes research conducted in England, South Africa, and the US, and combines experimental, social network, and multi-level survey data. Chapter 2 investigates whether the presence alone of multiethnic individuals in a social environment can improve relations between members of different monoethnic groups. I report that context-level exposure to multiethnic people is unlikely to affect monoethnic individuals’ intergroup relations. Chapter 3 addresses further the bridge- building potential of multiethnics by studying their location within friendship networks and how they are evaluated by monoethnics. I find that multiethnics tend to be evaluated with intermediate levels of favourability, that they often occupy broker positions within their friendship networks, but that this may have both positive and negative implications for intergroup relations. Chapter 4 focusses on monoethnic individuals’ contact experiences with multiethnic friends and suggests that the bridge-building potential of multiethnic individuals may be realised most effectively through direct and indirect intergroup contact. I discuss these findings further in Chapter 5, which also addresses the implications of my research for our understanding of intergroup relations in the increasingly heterogeneous societies of the 21st century.