Young people's attitudes towards Muslims in Sweden

Abstract

With the use of multiple regression technique, the principal objective of this study is to clarify and examine young people's attitudes towards Muslims, and the relationships between these attitudes and a large number of background factors. We use a representative sample of 9,498 non-Muslim youths between 15 and 19 years of age. The main results show that, when controlling for several background variables simultaneously, the country of birth, socio-economic background and school/programme factors all have an effect on the attitude towards Muslims. Moreover, socio-psychological factors, the relationship to friends and the perceptions of gender role patterns are found to be important. In addition, local factors like high levels of unemployment, high proportions of immigrants in a local environment also have an effect. No differences in the attitudes of boys and girls were found. Further, the study establishes a correlation between negative attitudes and right-wing populist seats in local government.

Keywords:

• Islamophobia
• attitudes
• racism
• youth
• culturation
• ethnic minorities

Notes

1. The number of 400,000 Muslims in 2007 is an assumption based on earlier figures given by Anwar, Blaschke and Sander (2004, p. 224) updated with net migration to Sweden from Muslim countries up to 2007.

2. The Swedish school system has nine obligatory grades followed by a three-year upper secondary school where students can choose between different programmes.

3. The reduction of responses is higher with increased age and a possible explanation for this is that in higher grades students have fewer classroom lectures and more apprenticeship hours. Since increased age induced higher positive attitudes towards Muslims we probably slightly underestimate the positive attitude towards Muslims by the population. See also Intolerans ( 2004 ) for more on the initial questionnaire, method of selection, reduction of responses, etc.

4. The internal correlation is 0.90 measured as the Cronbach alpha coefficient, which is on a satisfactory level. Since some of the statements were stated in the opposite direction, we reversed the coding for all statements in the same direction.

5. See Appendix B for an overview. Construction of all indices and the questions asked are available from the author upon request.

6. Available from author upon request.

7. The population and labour-market indicators are based on data from Statistics Sweden. The political indicator is based on statistics of the local elections of 2002.

8. Test for multicollinearity of both the variables feelings of social exclusion from society and gender role patterns gave a correlation of 0.23 and 0.44 respectively.