Elsevier

Social Networks

Volume 43, October 2015, Pages 57-72
Social Networks

Inter-ethnic friendship and negative ties in secondary school

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2015.03.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We focus on relationships between Roma and non-Roma students in Hungary.

  • We use self-declared ethnicity as well as ethnicity based on peer perception.

  • Friendships and negative ties are modelled using ERG models.

  • Non-Roma students disliked others in general whom they perceived as Roma.

  • Roma students disliked others perceived as Roma who declared themselves as non-Roma.

Abstract

This paper investigates several different aspects of inter-ethnic relationships. It focuses on friendships and negative ties between secondary school students from different ethnic backgrounds, introducing and measuring two different aspects of ethnicity: self-declared ethnicity, and ethnicity based on peer perception. These are first applied separately and then together on a sample of secondary school students in Hungary consisting of two ethnic groups: Roma and non-Roma Hungarian (N = 420). Friendships and negative ties are modelled using cross-sectional exponential random graph models for sixteen classrooms separately, and then individual models are summarized using meta-analysis. Based on the social identity approach, we predict that inter-ethnic friendships are less likely, and negative ties are more likely, than those within ethnic groups; and that majority students reject their minority peers more than the other way around. Moreover, minority students are expected to exclude those whom they perceive as minorities, but who, at the same time, identify with the majority group, since these classmates might seem to them as “traitors” of their “original” ethnic group. Results mostly confirm our hypotheses, emphasizing the role of perceived ethnicity: majority students tend to dislike peers whom they perceive as minorities, regardless of these peers’ self-declared ethnicity; on the other hand, minority students are likely to send friendship nominations towards their perceived minority classmates if these also declare themselves as minorities, but, as predicted, negative nominations if these declare themselves as majorities. This supports our general idea that different ethnicity aspects might influence friendships and negative ties in different ways, and inconsistencies in someone's ethnic categorization might play an important role in social rejection.

Introduction

In our ethnically diverse world inter-ethnic tension is a serious social issue. Minority groups are often in disadvantaged positions in their host societies which exacerbates this problem (e.g.: Quillian, 2012, Dustmann and Frattini, 2011). The formation of interracial and interethnic social ties might attenuate this tension as they serve as mediators of knowledge and information transfer. Hence, they potentially play a significant role in decreasing prejudice, and increasing the social and human capital of minorities (Coleman, 1988, Stark, 2011). Therefore, it is essential to find effective ways for creating positive, and eliminating negative social ties between members of different ethnic groups. It is often argued that the role of education is crucial in this regard, as it creates a formal opportunity for mixing students from different ethnic backgrounds, and these contact opportunities may lead to the emergence of inter-ethnic positive relations (Allport, 1954, Wright et al., 1997).

However, as Moody (2001) pointed out, formally integrated school classes can remain essentially segregated, if ethnically different students tend not to become friends with each other. Once contact opportunities are given, the magnitude of relational integration can be described by the likelihood of positive inter-ethnic relations. In the last decades, empirical studies have been conducted to explore the formation of students’ inter-ethnic friendship networks and the importance of ethnic mixing (see for example Moody, 2001, Stark and Flache, 2012). In these studies, it was found that the formation of inter-ethnic friendship ties tend to be relatively unlikely, and relational integration is not necessarily achieved by the opportunity of ethnic mixing only.

Our work extends existing research in at least two major ways. First, we emphasize that relational integration should be described not only by the prevalence of positive, but also by the absence of negative inter-ethnic relations. The lack of positive relations does not equal to the existence of negative ones, but interpersonal relations in ethnically fragmented social contexts are often hostile. As positive and negative relationships generally give rise to different structures, one of our main aims is to explore whether they are influenced differently by ethnicity. So far, only a relatively small number of studies have investigated networks of inter-ethnic negative ties (Stark and Flache, 2012), therefore the majority of the previous research in this field has missed an opportunity to capture some important aspects of the relational integration phenomenon. By analysing negative ties separately from positive relations, this paper contributes to our understanding of the nature of negative interpersonal relations in ethnically heterogeneous social contexts.

Second, we introduce two different aspects of ethnicity and apply them simultaneously. The first is self-declared ethnicity, which refers to one's own ethnic identification and is very commonly used in network studies (Munniksma et al., 2013, Stark et al., 2013, Tolsma et al., 2013). The second is peers’ perceptions of each others’ ethnicity, which captures the way someone is identified by others, which, by our knowledge, has not yet been used in social network models. The idea originates from the phenomenon that ethnicity is a situation-dependent social construction, rather than an objectively defined (and definable) attribute. This constructivist approach is not new. Brubaker (2009) gives a detailed theoretical review, starting with Weber's Economy and Society (1968), and examining several clusters of works that have contributed to developing ways of studying ethnicity without focusing on groups that are conceptually fixed. This allows us to empirically tackle the identification problem, that is, the issue that perceptions about someone's ethnicity may vary (Brubaker, 2004, Hogg and Terry, 2000, Jenkins, 2008), leading to potential inconsistencies between self-declared and perceived ethnicity (Marques et al., 1988, Ogbu, 2008, Saperstein and Penner, 2012). Besides demonstrating the different effects of these aspects of ethnicity, our research provides strong evidence that discrepancy between someone's self-declared and perceived ethnicity has a crucial influence on how much that person is liked or disliked by others.

Our theoretical framework is based on the social identity approach (Tajfel, 1974, Turner, 1975). A main idea of this approach is that individuals strive to maintain positive social identity in order to increase or maintain the level of their self-esteem. Social identity is based on comparisons between the ingroup, that is, one's own social group, and the outgroup. Tajfel and Turner (1979) proposed a number of strategies for dealing with a situation when individuals perceive their ingroup's social identity as negative compared to that of a relevant outgroup's. In this paper, we focus on three of these: (1) engagement in social competition with the higher status group; (2) individual mobility, that is, dissociation from the original group and attempting to join a higher status one; (3) internalization of the inferior social status and attempting to achieve positive self-esteem without positive social identity. Since these strategies influence the emergence of friendships and negative social ties within and between social groups, examining the likelihood of these relationships also gives us indications about which strategies were chosen by the students in a given community.

Our goal is to investigate inter-ethnic segregation in secondary school by analysing relationships between majority and minority students; specifically between non-Roma and Roma students in Hungary. As we are interested in how positive and negative relations are associated with self-declared and perceived ethnicity, we choose a rather descriptive analytic approach to focus on the relative prevalence of same-ethnic and inter-ethnic social ties in a community. That is, we examine the likelihood of different positive and negative same-ethnic and inter-ethnic relationships using cross-sectional network models.

To foreshadow our methodological framework, we estimate exponential random graph models (Lusher et al., 2012) on the sample of 16 Hungarian secondary school classes (average age = 15.9, N = 420). After building individual models for each school class, we meta-analyze the results to discover general tendencies. Our results demonstrate that accounting for both positive and negative nominations and capturing the nominators’ perceptions provide us with a new perspective about ethnic segregation.

Section snippets

Integration and segregation

Those who promote integrated education usually argue that contact between minority and majority students should lead to the formation and development of social relations beyond their own ethnic groups, and this, along with the emergence of positive attitudes towards minority ethnic groups, should directly decrease prejudice and increase social cohesion at the societal level (Allport, 1954, Tropp and Pettigrew, 2005, Pettigrew and Tropp, 2008, Munniksma et al., 2013). Proponents also emphasize

Context

The situation of Roma people in Hungary is an illustrative example not only for inter-ethnic tension, but also for the seriously underprivileged status of minorities and general prejudice towards them. Traditionally, Roma people constitute the largest minority group in Hungary, and their history has always been characterized by social and economic exclusion (Goldberg, 2006, Kertesi and Kézdi, 2011). Due to high birth rate, their population has continued to grow in the last decades (Janky, 2006

Methods

For the analysis, exponential random graph models (ERGMs) were estimated. In ERGMs, the dependent variable of the analysis is a binary tie variable. A tie from actor i to actor j can be present or absent, presence is denoted by i  j, and the tie variable takes the value 1 or 0 respectively. The network is constituted by the tie variables, represented by an n × n adjacency matrix, where n stands for the total number of actors, and self-nominations are excluded. This statistical approach estimates

Descriptive results

Before presenting the results of the exponential random graph models, it is important to take a closer look at some descriptive characteristics of our sample. Table 2 shows that 38% of the students were self-declared Roma, with a big variation across classrooms. The average is quite high compared to the proportion of Roma minority in Hungary, but it is the result of our sample selection criteria. It illustrates the highly disadvantaged position of the Roma group in the Hungarian society that

Discussion

The goal of this study was to explore important characteristics of inter-ethnic friendships and negative relationships in order to see which aspects of relational integration appear in these networks. Furthermore, we focused on two different aspects of ethnicity, that is, self-declaration and peer-perception, for investigating more deeply the different dimensions of ethnic integration, and also for analysing the effect of the possible discrepancies between someone's self-identified and

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA) K-881336 and the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/J500112/1), and was realized in the scope of MTA TK ‘Lendület’ Research Center for Educational and Network Studies. We wish to thank Tom Snijders, Károly Takács, Johan Koskinen, René Veenstra, James Moody, András Vörös, two anonymous reviewers, and other colleagues from Oxford, Budapest, Groningen and Duke for helpful comments on this work.

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    These authors contributed equally to this work.

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