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Testing the Contact Hypothesis: The Association Between Personal Friendships and Anti-Jewish Attitudes Among 13- to 15-Year-Old Students in England and Wales

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Religion, Citizenship and Democracy

Part of the book series: Religion and Human Rights ((REHU,volume 8))

Abstract

Drawing on data provided by 5811 students from schools in England, Wales and London who self-identified as either ‘no religion’ or as Christian, this study explored the effect of the contact hypothesis (having friends who are Jewish) on scores recorded on the five-item Scale of Anti-Jewish Attitude (SAJA), after controlling for type of school (with or without a religious character), location (England, Wales, and London), personal factors (sex and age), psychological factors (extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism) and religious factors (self-assigned affiliation as Christian, worship attendance, and belief in God). The data demonstrated the positive effect of having friends who are Jews on lowering anti-Jewish attitudes. The path is then described from educational research to curriculum development in the design of resources that offer young learners vicarious experience of having friends who are Jews.

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Acknowledgement

Young People’s Attitudes to Religious Diversity Project (AHRC Reference: AH/G014035/1) was a large-scale mixed methods research project investigating the attitudes of 13- to 16-year-old students across the United Kingdom. Students from a variety of socio-economic, cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds from different parts of England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, with the addition of London as a special case, took part in the study. Professor Robert Jackson was principal investigator and Professor Leslie J. Francis was co-investigator. Together they led a team of qualitative and quantitative researchers based in the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit, within the Centre for Education Studies, University of Warwick. The project was part of the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme and ran from 2009–2012.

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  1. University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Leslie J. Francis

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  1. Ursula McKenna
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  1. Department of Humanities and Theology, TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany

    Alexander Unser

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McKenna, U., Francis, L.J. (2021). Testing the Contact Hypothesis: The Association Between Personal Friendships and Anti-Jewish Attitudes Among 13- to 15-Year-Old Students in England and Wales. In: Unser, A. (eds) Religion, Citizenship and Democracy. Religion and Human Rights, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83277-3_11

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