Attitudes on how to promote integration

Integration requires not just the immigrant population, but also the majority population to make concessions.

This theme – which is actually little studied in social psychology, involves something more than to show tolerance. It requires the majority population’s attitudes to “stretch” and adjust with a view towards proactively advancing integration of ethnic minorities.

The result of the first step in the project is that we have succeeded to develop and validate a measuring instrument to detect such attitudes.

The result of a subsequent study indicates moreover that such ”proactive” attitudes, amongst other things go together with the majorities beliefs on how far the immigrant population constitutes a uniform group or consists of different groups with different perceptions and opinions. The investigations are included in a PhD project. (Phelps)

Published Nov. 7, 2012 1:03 PM