Bystander reactions to the intergroup exclusion of immigrants among British children and adolescents

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In recent times the number of immigrants in the United Kingdom has increased noticeably. While many of these adult immigrants experience discrimination in their new home, they are often accompanied by immigrant children and adolescents who also experience pervasive social exclusion and discrimination in school settings. Such social exclusion is problematic since it is known to establish a pattern of life-long challenges including negative psychological outcomes, poor academic achievement and limited future employment opportunities. One effective means to address the social exclusion of immigrant students is to encourage their peers, who unlike adults are often bystanders (i.e., witnesses) to the exclusion, to challenge an act of exclusion when it is observed. In order to develop educational strategies to facilitate such bystander reactions we first need to improve our knowledge of how British children and adolescents as bystanders support or reject social exclusion based on immigrant status.This proposed project aims to enhance our knowledge by conducting three studies to determine when and why British children and adolescents as bystanders reject or perpetuate the social exclusion of immigrants. The knowledge produced by these studies through our pathway to impact strategy will be used to inform educational policies and practices within schools which encourages students to challenge the social exclusion of immigrants due to discrimination. Typically bystander research in psychology and education has focused on how individual and classroom characteristics are related to the tendency of children when they are bystanders to challenge interpersonal bullying (due to individual characteristics, such as shyness or poor social skills). This project will for the first time examine whether British children and adolescents as bystanders support or challenge the intergroup exclusion (due to prejudice and discrimination) of immigrants by drawing from the Social Reasoning Developmental (SRD) approach to intergroup social exclusion and the applicant's previous research into bystander reactions and social exclusion in childhood and adolescence. The proposed project will investigate the development of children's (8-10 years) and adolescent's (13-15 years) reactions as bystanders to the intergroup exclusion of immigrants in everyday settings, to understand when and why they would support or challenge this type of social exclusion. The participants will be recruited using the research team's established connections with schools in areas of London and Kent. In each of the three studies, children and adolescents will be presented with scenarios involving the intergroup exclusion of an immigrant peer and asked to what extent they as bystanders would challenge or support their group's exclusion of this peer. Importantly the studies will examine how the social-moral judgments and reasoning expressed by bystander British children and adolescents about challenging the social exclusion of a peer are dependent on the following criteria: whether the victim is an immigrant from a similar or different nation or a non-immigrant (Study 1), whether their national identity is at the forefront of their mind (Study 1), whether they expect their own British group and the immigrant group to be inclusive or exclusion (Study 2), whether they hold negative stereotypes of immigrants (Study 3) and whether they think the excluded immigrant peer holds knowledge about the activity from which they were excluded (Study 3). The findings of the studies will highlight the importance at different ages of focusing on national identity, cultural differences and similarities with immigrants, group norms, negative stereotypes of immigrants and shared knowledge with immigrants when designing school interventions to encourage bystander reactions that will challenge the social exclusion of immigrants.