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Mediators of the Contact–Prejudice Relation among South African Students on Four University Campuses
Author(s) -
Tredoux Colin,
Finchilescu Gillian
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
journal of social issues
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.618
H-Index - 122
eISSN - 1540-4560
pISSN - 0022-4537
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-4560.2010.01646.x
Subject(s) - prejudice (legal term) , relation (database) , contact hypothesis , social psychology , association (psychology) , psychology , database , computer science , psychotherapist
Intergroup contact is undoubtedly associated with lower levels of self‐reported prejudice. In some situations, however, contact may have little or no association with prejudice. Studies conducted in apartheid South Africa rarely found such an association. Apartheid was overturned in 1994, but there have been few explicit tests of the relationship since then. The present study explored the relation between contact and prejudice in a large (N= 2,599) and diverse nonprobability sample of South Africans. Participants were recruited from four universities. In addition, factors were explored that might modulate the contact–prejudice relation, or have independent effects. The relation between prejudice and contact was larger for affective prejudice (r≈ |.35|) than for social distance (r≈ |.2|). Analysis showed that the effects of contact were not reducible to those of other variables, although the contact–prejudice relation was mediated in many instances.