Intergroup contact and intergroup attitudes: a longitudinal study

By Rupert Brown, Anja Eller, S. Leeds, Kim Stace. 2007

238 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A longitudinal study (N=109) of interschool contact and attitudes was conducted to test Allport's (1954) Contact Hypothesis and Brown and Hewstone's (2005) addendum to it on the moderating role of typicality in the contact-attitude relationship. Three different measures of intergroup attitude were employed, including a new measure of infrahumanisation (Leyens et al., 2000). Support for the hypotheses was found on all three measures in the longitudinal analyses. Quantity of contact with a member of the outgroup was consistently associated with more favourable attitudes towards the outgroup as a whole. Importantly, contact was found to predict attitude but the reverse causal path was not significant. Also, on one measure there was an indication that the effects of contact quality were more beneficial when the contact persons were seen as typical of the outgroup than when they were not. It is concluded that, as originally hypothesised by Allport, contact with members of an outgroup can improve intergroup attitudes, but especially if those people can be seen as representative of their group.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/73c74e33766de296c7c9f36019fca00bdabde7c8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Gender Studies

1. M. Verkuyten
2. Rupert Brown
3. A. Mummendey
4. Hanna Zagefka
5. M. Walker
6. Woosoon Kim
7. Zening Song
8. A. Daryanto

In Social Psychology

1. M. Verkuyten
2. Rupert Brown
3. Hanna Zagefka
4. J. Leyens
5. S. Demoulin
6. A. Mummendey
7. Thomas Kessler
8. Catherine Bousfield

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Rupert Brown
2. M. Verkuyten
3. Hanna Zagefka
4. J. Thijs
5. J. Leyens
6. S. Demoulin
7. A. Mummendey
8. Thomas Kessler

Citations in the corpus

• Contact, Anxiety, and Young People's Attitudes and Behavioral Intentions Towards the Elderly (2010, background): “, Allan & Johnson, 2009; Caspi, 1984; Hale, 1998; Knox, Gekoski, & Johnson, 1986; Meshel & McGlynn, 2004; Schwartz & Simmons, 2001). Caspi (1984) was one of the first to extend contact principles into the sphere of age-related attitudes, finding that children who had frequent contact with elderly cl”
• Intergroup Contact and Ingroup Reappraisal: Examining the Deprovincialization Thesis (2010, background): “This positive effect of contact is not only found for the quality of the contact but also for quantity of contact (e.g., Brown et al. 2007; Tausch et al. 2007; Velasco González et al. 2008; Ward and Masgoret 2006) and for contact opportunities (Hallinan and Smith 1985; Wagner et al. 2003).”
• Does contact reduce prejudice or does prejudice reduce contact? A longitudinal test of the contact hypothesis among majority and minority groups in three European countries. (2009, background): “With few exceptions (Gerard & Miller, 1975; Schofield, 1979), other longitudinal studies have also shown that contact generally has beneficial effects on intergroup attitudes (Brown et al., 2007; Eller & Abrams, 2003, 2004; Hamilton & Bishop, 1976; Maras & Brown, 1996).”