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

一体化程度几乎跟不上现代社会日益增长的多样性。今天，超过4000万（约10%）有移民背景的人生活在欧盟，这一发展很可能不会放缓，正如最近一波绝望的人在欧盟寻求庇护所表明的那样。许多移民在移民国内缺乏社会融合，这就造成了隔离社会，移民和非移民往往共存，群体间几乎没有接触：这是偏见、歧视和群体间冲突的滋生地。因此，关键的挑战是鼓励积极的群体间接触，从而成功地提高群体间的容忍度。尽管这一研究领域取得了令人印象深刻的进展，但社会发展的视角很少被应用，这阻碍了研究人员(a)研究长期接触效应，(b)识别接触效应的年龄特异性差异，以及(c)探索接触经验和社会、情感和认知技能的复杂平行发展，这些技能有望对发育中的青少年产生积极的长期影响。拟议中的研究将通过扩展我们之前的工作来改变这一点。我们之前的工作是一项纵向研究，每年分三次（2010年至2012年）跟踪调查10,000多名青少年。首先，我们将继续研究这个现在已经19岁的样本：这是一个非常有趣的发展阶段，使我们能够研究向青年成年的过渡，在这个阶段，个人成为负责任的公民，进入劳动力市场，并获得他们的第一次政治经验。此外，我们还将开始研究一个新的14岁的队列，分三波进行，这将与较老的队列相结合，创建一个独特的纵向数据集，包括两个纵向队列，涵盖从青春期早期到成年早期的近十年。研究结果不仅将为科学界提供新的数据，并就早期群体间接触经验的作用和长期影响提供有价值的见解，而且还将告知广大非学术受众关于在未来社会中增加社会融合和减少偏见的可能性。在这个雄心勃勃的项目中，我们将利用我们与政府部门（如教育部、社区和地方政府部门）和慈善组织（如挑战网络）的密切联系，寻求建立一个更加融合的社会。最后，我们将把新的研究成果付诸实践，在学校环境中设计一个有效的、适合年龄的、基于证据的接触干预。

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.