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Abstract
Previous discussion of the opportunities for young people with an ethnic minority background to integrate into society has focused on advantages or disadvantages caused by human capital or by ethnically motivated, individual, group or institutional discrimination within society. However, in recent years there has been a growing interest in subjectively or collectively perceived discrimination and its effects on ethnic identity and (re-)ethnicisation. This paper reports on the processes involved in the (re-)ethnicisation of young people with a Turkish ethnic background which results from perceived personal and group discrimination. A discrimination/(re-)ethnicisation path-model is proposed where perceived discrimination influences the perceived non-permeability of group boundaries and ethnic identity. This results in a direct and positive effect on (re-)ethnicisation. Analyses of empirical investigations partly support the model, in accordance with which perceived personal and group discrimination produce direct effects on the perceived non-permeability of group boundaries and indirect effects on ethnic identity and (re-)ethnicisation. Against the model proposed here, perceived personal and group discrimination have a direct impact on (re-)ethnicisation.
Acknowledgements
The study was facilitated by a research grant from the Jacobs Foundation. Thanks are due to Birgit Reißig, Tilly Lex, Nora Gaupp, Frank Braun, Hartmut Mittag and Ralf Kuhnke from the DJI's research priority area ‘Transitions to Work’ (Übergänge in Arbeit), without whom this study would not have been possible. I also acknowledge the helpful comments of Solvejg Jobst and the anonymous JEMS reviewers of previous versions of this manuscript. Responsibility for the final version is, of course, mine alone.
Notes
1. Ladin (Ladino in Italian, Ladin in Ladin, Ladinisch in German) is a Rhaeto-Romance language spoken in the Dolomite mountains in Italy, between the regions of Trentino-South Tyrol and Veneto.
2. Research into groups who are not of foreign ethnicity is more developed with regards to ‘group xenophobia’. For a more comprehensive overview of the state of research in this domain, see Heitmeyer (2002).
3. ‘Less’ or ‘efficient’ are socially open categories, whose cultural meaning first appears within the course of exchanges between groups.
4. In addition to this strategy, a considerable body of research can be found in the literature which presents different strategies people can adopt in order to enhance a negative social identity: strategies of social creativity, social competition, realistic competition, recategorisation at a higher level and preferences for temporal comparison (Tajfel and Turner 1986).
5. The indications serve to label the variables in the path diagram: indivDis=perceives personal discrimination; groupDis=perceived group discrimination; n-Permea=perceived non-permeability of group boundaries; ethId=ethnic identity; reEth=(re-)ethnicisation.
6. After finishing the questionnaire the young people were asked to participate in subsequent interviews. Nearly 2,900 of the 4,000 youngsters interviewed agreed to participate in the following waves of the survey. These were carried out using computer-assisted telephone interviewing. Since the survey was financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research for the purpose of evaluating strategies for integrating disadvantaged young people, it did not aim at realising a representative sample. But this in our case should not be a problem because here we want to test just for correlations. For further questions about the details of the samples, see Gaupp et al. (Citation2004).
7. Prior to the data collection, letters were sent to parents explaining the purpose of the study and requesting them to return a signed letter if they did not want their child to participate.
8. In order to establish the scale, the indicators were added together and divided by the number of indicators. This procedure was used for all of the following scales.
9. In this respect all of the following calculations were done with manifest and latent variables. In presenting the mediation effects only, the structural model (without the manifest variables) is depicted.
10. Additionally five error covariances were introduced between ‘diskdc and diskj’, ‘klassta and nied’, ‘diskab and diskdc’, ‘diskab and diskj’ and ‘klassta and schwd’.
