Tolerance more than equality? Two facets of tolerance towards immigrants among Czech adolescents

ABSTRACT

This study focused on facets of tolerance towards immigrants among Czech adolescents, drawing on data from 9^th and 10^th graders (n = 2003). The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between tolerance towards immigrants and support for democracy, repression potential, right-wing authoritarianism, and out-group trust. Results showed that tolerance towards immigrants should be treated as a two-dimensional concept: support for equal rights, focused on equality in labour market, housing or access to education, and support for cultural rights, encompassing acceptance of immigrants’ rights to practice their culture and religion. We found that Czech adolescents were generally more supportive of equal rights than of cultural rights, and that out-group trust explained most of the variance for both dimensions of tolerance towards immigrants. The study also indicated ambiguous effects in the relationship between right-wing authoritarianism, repression potential and support for equal/cultural rights of immigrants with out-group trust used as moderating variable.

KEYWORDS:

• Tolerance
• immigrants
• out-group trust
• right-wing authoritarianism
• adolescence

Acknowledgments

This paper is part of the larger study “Psychological Aspects of Adolescents’ Civic Development” supported by Czech Science Foundation (grant no. GA14-20582S).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Schools for children with special needs were excluded from the selection.

² Questionnaires were collected as part of school curricula, and therefore we did not obtain particular informed consents from parents of respondents. This procedure was approved by the university lawyer and was in accordance with Czech law.

³ One-factor model was also tested, with unacceptable fit: χ²/df = 99.99 CFI = 0,79; RMSEA = 0.23.

⁴ We used the four-item measure considering that all four items of the measure were conceptually linked.

⁵ Across analyses, by ‘low’ value we refer to a value of −1 SD below the mean and by ‘high’ value +1 SD above the mean.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation [GA14-20582S].