Social integration in diverse societies: the importance of contact experiences in youth

Levels of integration barely keep pace with the growing diversity in modern societies. Today, more than 40 million people (about 10%) with an immigrant background live in the European Union and this development will most likely not slow down, as indicated by the recent waves of desperate people seeking asylum in the EU. Many immigrants lack social integration within the immigration country, which creates segregated societies in which immigrants and non-immigrants tend to coexist with little intergroup contact: a breeding ground for prejudice, discrimination, and intergroup conflict.

The key challenge is, therefore, to encourage positive intergroup contact, which successfully improves intergroup tolerance. Despite impressive progress in this field of research, a social-developmental perspective has rarely been applied, which prevents researchers (a) from studying long-term contact effects, (b) from identifying age-specific differences in contact effects, and (c) from exploring the complex parallel development of contact experiences and social, emotional, and cognitive skills that is expected to have positive long-term effects for developing adolescents.

The proposed research will change this by extending our previous work which launched a longitudinal study that followed more than 10,000 adolescents annually over three waves (from 2010 to 2012). We will, first, continue to study this sample that is now 19 years old: a highly interesting developmental stage that allows us to examine the transition to young adulthood, in which individuals become responsible citizens, enter the labour market, and gain their first political experiences. Moreover, we will also start to study a new cohort of 14-year-olds over three waves, which will-in combination with the older cohort-create a unique longitudinal dataset with two longitudinal cohorts covering almost ten years from early adolescence to early adulthood.

Findings will not only provide new data for the scientific community and valuable insights regarding the role and long-term effects of early intergroup contact experiences, but will also inform a broad non-academic audience about possibilities for increasing social integration and reducing prejudice among the future adults of tomorrow's societies. For this ambitious project we will make use of our close links to government departments (e.g., Department for Education, Department for Communities and Local Government) and charity organizations (e.g., The Challenge Network) that seek to build a more integrated society. Finally, we will put the new research findings into practice by designing an effective, age-appropriate, and evidence-based contact intervention in the school context.

Who will benefit from this research?

- Government departments (e.g., Department of Work and Pensions; Department of Communities and Local Government; Department for Education) and NGOs (e.g., Equality & Diversity Forum; The Challenge)
- Scientific community (i.e., national and international scientists within and beyond our research field)
- Schools, teachers, social workers


How will they benefit from this research?

- Government departments and NGOs, with whom we are already working together (see "Pathways to Impact" for more details), will benefit from our research in the form of evidence-based recommendations and suggested policy updates based on our research. Within annual feedback sessions with all these parties, we aim to systematically disseminate the revealed knowledge of new findings to stakeholders for stimulating the exchange between both different stakeholders and stakeholders and other academics.

- Scientific community will benefit from our research given the academic impact that our revealed findings are likely to have. Given the lack of available data, we will produce novel insights regarding the role of early intergroup contact experiences for reducing prejudice and fostering civic engagement, which will be summarized as research papers in high-impact journals and as presentations at the leading academic conferences in our field. Moreover, the generated data, which will be shared with the international research community using a well-established data archive, will be of interest for national and international scientists within and beyond our field of research in order to study of integration processes among immigrants in Europe.

- Schools, teachers, and social workers can benefit from our research in the form of an age-appropriate and effective intergroup contact intervention designed for the school context. After having identified relevant factors that prevent or help to increase social integration during specific developmental periods, we will be able to make evidence-based recommendations that guide the design of a tailored contact intervention for secondary-school students that will be of value for both ethnically diverse schools and ethnically homogenous school contexts.