Changing perceptions? Effects of multiple social categorisation on German population’s perception of Muslims

ABSTRACT

Multiple social categorisation is one option for influencing people’s perception such that negative social opinions based on ethnicity, race, or religion decrease or disappear entirely. This study aims to examine German population’s perception of Muslims when multiple categorisation is applied. Based on data of 7341 respondents stemming from a factorial survey experiment used in a national, random-digit-dial telephone survey, we tested the effect of multiple social categorisation using the hypothetical situation of a Muslim marrying into the own family. Multiple categorisation works only when the Muslim in question is a woman. But perception differences between the Muslim woman and the Christian woman do not totally disappear. When the Muslim person in the same scenario is a man, multiple social categorisation has no effect on the perception of respondents. We discuss the implications of these results with regard to the Muslim as category of analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Categorisation
• religious diversity
• ethnicity
• identity
• perception

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Low response rates in telephone surveys are observed internationally (Curtin, Presser, and Singer 2005; de Leeuw and de Heer 2002). In 2012, the response rate for a typical telephone survey at Pew Research was at 9% (Pew Research Center 2012). But low response rates have not to be resulting in biased estimates (Groves 2006; Keeter et al. 2006).

2. As central socio-demographic variables were matched with population parameters, we compared data from census 2011 on religious affiliation with the data gathered by ZeS. The census 2011 employed two questions on religious affiliation. Unfortunately, the second question was optional yielding unreliable results. So, the Federal Statistical Office illustrated only the percentage of Christians to be 66.8% (Egeler 2013, 10). Compared to that, Zes data (N = 7341) yielded 62.5% (unweighted) and 68.5% (weighted). Thus, the weighted results of the ZeS come closer to the population parameter of the census 2011 regarding Christians.

3. Item nonresponse on the dependent variable was high (9.8%). This mainly could be the result of leaving out the middle category of the response scale. The middle category was left out to avoid satisficing (Krosnick 1991). However, we also conducted multinomial regression analysis including missing values and got the same pattern of relationships.

4. See also the website: http://www.behindthename.com, accessed 9 January 2016.

5. This also can be taken as evidence that age differences stemming from attending different school forms were not relevant. Otherwise, one would expect more negative perception of the young-aged person. One would also expect significant difference in item response rates. But this is also not the case.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the Mercator Foundation [number 53102727].