Coming together or remaining apart? A closer examination of the contexts of intergroup contact and friendship between urban residents and rural-to-urban migrants in China

ABSTRACT

The implications of intergroup contact for the social integration of rural migrant workers have received limited scholarly attention in China. Drawing on Allport's contact hypothesis and its recent extensions, this study investigates, from the perspective of urban residents, the situational and relational contexts within which intergroup encounters occur. Using the Urban Resident Survey conducted in 2014 across thirteen cities in China, we compare contact between urbanites and migrants in two social spaces: the workplace and the residential community. We also examine whether their associations with intergroup friendships differ for urbanites with kinship ties to migrants. Our findings highlight the complexities of contact, along with its strengths and limitations in bringing diverse groups closer together. Workplace contact is positively associated with intergroup friendships, whereas residential community contact is negatively related to such ties. Furthermore, kinship relations with migrants can undermine positive contacts but do not provide a buffer for negative encounters.

KEYWORDS:

• Social integration
• intergroup relations
• contact hypothesis
• workplace
• residential community

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. We also gratefully acknowledge that the funding of data collection for this study is partially supported by Faculty of Social Science Seed Grant at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We also tested models with the number of intergroup friendships top-coded at 10, 25 and 50. The results remain largely robust, with the exception of the interaction term for kinship ties and distant migrant neighbours in the models top-coded at 10 and 25, which becomes statistically insignificant. However, given that the interaction term for kinship ties and frequent workplace contact remains robust for all the models, the main arguments of our study are unchanged.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Social Science Seed Grant.