End Seminar: Jeffrey Mitchell, PhD student, Department of Sociology, Umeå University
Abstract
This thesis explores how contexts influence anti-immigrant attitudes during adolescence, and how attitudes change in societies over time. Research investigating what influences prejudicial attitudes has coalesced around two theoretical approaches either explaining prejudice as a process of socialization or through the lens of intergroup relations. Each approach places the focus of what drives anti-immigrant attitudes on to different contextual influences that should be important at different times of the life course, and have largely been segregated in to different disciplinary traditions of either psychology or sociology. This thesis draws distinctions between these approaches, highlighting the strengths and shortcomings of each, and proposes a new approach to the study of anti-immigrant attitudes and prejudice. It advocates that macro contextual conditions not strictly limited to direct competition over scarce resources should be important during the formative years of adolescence. Using a diverse range of datasets, the findings support this approach. While not comprehensive, it takes in to account the strengths of both and adds to them by incorporating a consideration of change over time, in the interest of what Gordon Allport called “a more adequate understanding of a concrete social problem.”
