Generation, ethnic and religious diversity in friendship choice: exploring interethnic close ties in Britain

Abstract

Interethnic friendships can reflect intergroup relations and immigrants' integration into host societies. Using pooled 2007–09 Citizenship Surveys, this study investigates interethnic friendship patterns and determinants of friendship choice in Britain. The paper focuses on generational, ethnic and religious diversity in forming interethnic close ties. The most common friendship pattern is having co-ethnic close friends. This ethnic boundary in interethnic ties, however, weakens across generations whereby those born in or migrated to Britain at young ages have a higher chance of having close friends from other ethnic groups. We find that interethnic friendships are formed in a ‘pan-ethnic’ pattern by which those with similar ethnic/racial and religious background such as Muslim Indians and Pakistanis, or mixed white and black Caribbean and black Caribbean, are more likely to nominate one another as close friends.

Keywords:

• interethnic friendship
• religion
• integration
• generation
• pan-ethnicity
• Britain

Acknowledgements

This study used the Citizenship Survey data made publicly available by the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex (http://www.data-archive.ac.uk). The author thanks Anthony Heath and anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments.

Notes

1. For detailed information on the CS, see http://www.esds.ac.uk/findingData/snDescription.asp?sn=5739

2. Although we can further identify minority ethnic individuals born in Britain whose parents were also born in Britain – the so-called third generation – their number is too small to make a meaningful statistical analysis. Therefore, this study only distinguishes between first and second generation.

3. There are approximately 8,700 wards in England and Wales.

4. We also ran multinomial logistic regression estimating the probability of having (1) both co-ethnic and interethnic friends and (2) only interethnic friends as opposed to having only co-ethnic friends. We found that the variables associated with having both co-ethnic and interethnic friends and having interethnic friends only are practically the same. Therefore we decided to combine these two categories together.

5. In 2007, the CRE was merged with two other commissions to form the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Raya Muttarak

RAYA MUTTARAK is a Research Scientist at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (IIASA, VID/ÖAW and WU), Vienna Institute of Demography, Austrian Academy of Sciences. She is also a research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria.