Interracial friendship and the trajectory of prominority attitudes: Assessing intergroup contact theory

Abstract

We analyze the trajectory of racial attitude change among White university students, over a 4-year time period, representing an advancement over previous studies’ use of longitudinal designs alone to test the causal ordering and nature of the relationship between contact and attitudes. Adding to the literature on intergroup friendships, we examined the impact of two types of intergroup contact (interracial friendships and neighborhood racial context) on two types of racial attitudes: attitudes supportive of affirmative action and feelings of commonality with minorities. Overall, we find that a greater number of interracial friendships is associated with more positive racial attitudes. Women and those with more interracial friendships experience a faster rate of increase in their endorsement of affirmative action policies. Individuals growing up in more racially homogeneous neighborhoods expressed less support for affirmative action and politically conservative students had lower support for both affirmative action and feelings of commonality.