Inter-Ethnic Neighbourhood Acquaintances of Migrants and Natives in Germany: On the Brokering Roles of Inter-Ethnic Partners and Children

Abstract

Social scientists have long emphasised the importance of personal inter-ethnic contact for overcoming prejudices and enhancing social cohesion in mixed societies. But why do some people have more contact with their neighbours of other ethnicity? Using new data from a large-scale German survey, I analyse the brokering roles of children and inter-ethnic partners in explaining inter-ethnic neighbourhood acquaintances. Even on a contextual level, my results suggest that people living in regions with larger shares of children have more inter-ethnic neighbourhood acquaintances, which expands earlier findings on the general integrating function of children. However, I also argue that we should recognise brokering to be context-specific and exemplify this by showing how the brokering role of inter-ethnic partners is evident particularly in interaction with inter-ethnic encounters at local bars and restaurants, while that of children is evident particularly given their frequent inter-ethnic encounters in public parks and playgrounds. On a theoretical level, my results demonstrate the importance of studying the interaction of mechanisms in explaining personal (inter-ethnic) contact.

Keywords:

• Inter-Ethnic Contact
• Weak Ties
• Neighbourhood
• Networks
• Brokering
• Ethnic Diversity

Acknowledgements

This research is part of the project ‘Ethnic Diversity, Social Trust and Civic Engagement’, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ruud Koopmans, and is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. I wish to thank to Sarah Carol, Martin Ehlert, Ruud Koopmans, Joscha Legewie, Nicolas Legewie, Elmar Schlueter, Celine Teney, Wouter van der Brug, Matthew Wright and two anonymous JEMS reviewers for helpful comments and ideas.

Notes

1. Although the aim in conducting the EDCA Survey was to test theoretical hypotheses and not to make representative descriptive statements, a comparison to the German Micro-Census suggests that the EDCA Survey is fairly representative, but shows the common pattern of an undersample of lower- and oversamples of higher-educated and single respondents. These and all other additional results can be obtained from the author upon request.

2. I also ran models with the maximum value set to 15 and 25, yet found that the principle structure of the results does not change, with the exception of the relation between the regional share of children and the absolute number of inter-ethnic acquaintances, which drops below significance.

3. There is a problem with 114 respondents who have no acquaintances in the neighbourhood at all. For these the share is mathematically not defined, because there is no solution to a division by 0. I do not consider these 114 respondents in the results discussed. However, the results generally hold when these respondents' relative shares of inter-ethnic neighbourhood acquaintances are set to 0, 50 or 100.

4. All context information (the local unemployment rate, population density, share of children under the age of ten and local out-group size) was derived from the Federal Statistical Office of Germany (www.destatis.de) with the exception of the local crime rate, which was derived from the German Federal Criminal Police Office.

5. Unfortunately only 80 per cent of the respondents answered all the questions. This is especially due to missing values on the two dependent variables as well as respondents' estimation of the frequency of inter-ethnic encounters. I re-estimated the models with 20 multivariate imputations for the missing values on any of the variables. The imputation model consisted of all variables of the later analysis, including the interaction terms. The results of the analyses that include these multiply imputed variables are similar in conclusion.

6. The results also hold true when the regressions are specified as multi-level models. The only difference is that the regional share of children is only a marginally significant predictor of the absolute number of inter-ethnic acquaintances. Since the hypothesis test is two-sided, however, the directed hypothesis still passes the commonly accepted 5 per cent threshold.

7. I also estimated ordered logistic regression models with cluster-robust standard errors. The results are basically the same. One difference is that the interactions between having an inter-ethnic partner and the frequency of inter-ethnic encounters at local bars and restaurants only reaches marginal significance. However, since the hypothesis test is two-sided, the directed hypothesis is still supported at the commonly accepted 5 per cent level.